★★★☆☆
FOR his directorial debut Andy Serkis has eschewed the fantastical special effects work like Gollum, King Kong and Caesar from the new Planet Of The Apes films that made his name in favour of a wide-eyed, sweepingly romantic true-life story that, even if it doesn’t wholly succeed, aims to inspire.
This is the mid-20th-century story of Robin and Diana Cavendish (Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy), a well-off and adventurous young English couple who fall madly in love and settle down to raise a family.
However, their life is turned upside down when, while on a holiday in Nairobi, Robin contracts polio and is paralysed from the neck down, unable to breathe and purportedly with only a matter of months to live.
But refusing to give in to the constraints of the illness, Robin and Diana find a way to move forward with their lives decades longer than expected, leading along the way to the invention of a pioneering new wheelchair that allows Robin to move around while doing his breathing for him.
It’s an undoubtedly harrowing story with a personal tie to the film’s making – the producer, Jonathan Cavendish, is the son of the central character and co-founder of Serkis’s performance capture studio The Imaginarium. There’s therefore a compassionate, earnest glow to Serkis’s directorial touch.
However, it means that in order to maintain its poise it has to politely brush aside some of the story’s harsher elements and explorations of the societal impact of Robin’s adopted lifestyle invention on other polio sufferers and the medical community. It’s a film that proudly shows off the twee twinkle in its eye from the get-go and wears it like a badge of honour until its weepy-eyed final moments.
One could view this as a cynical exercise in Oscar-baiting, not least in the case of Garfield’s physically restricted performance that requires him to act mostly with expressions alternating between anguish and spiritedness.
But you don’t ever feel Serkis is pulling those sorts of shenanigans, thanks to a warm-hearted sense of sincerity and affection for the couple and their unwavering love for one another. In spite of familiar illness biopic tropes and a certain kind of dramatic reticence stopping it from truly soaring as it should, it gently uplifts and makes you feel like a warmly embraced passenger along for the journey.
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