Heartfelt film Breathe starring Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy is a joyful, reflective take on couple who overcome paralysis in 1960s
Based on a true story, the gripping drama tells the story of a tea trader who finds himself paralysed from the neck down
By Brian Viner, Daily Mail Oct 27, 2017
You would surely need a heart of stone not to be moved by this beautiful film. In fact, even that might not be enough.
Breathe tells the true story of an upper-crust English couple, Robin and Diana Cavendish (wonderfully played by Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy), who meet in 1958 with the world seemingly at their feet.
They are dazzlingly attractive, privileged, sociable, popular. Scarcely have they married and set up home in Kenya, where Robin works as a tea-broker, at least until it’s time for G&Ts on the verandah, then Diana falls pregnant. They are on the threshold of a gilded life together.
Claire Foy in a scene from 'Breathe.'
But then, out of the clear blue African sky, catastrophe strikes. Robin contracts polio and Diana is told not only that he will be paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his days, but that those days are strictly numbered. He has a few months at best.
Anyone who watched the Netflix series The Crown will recall Foy playing another young, upper-class, married woman who was also in Kenya, also in the Fifties, when she received devastating, life-changing news.
In that instance, it was that the King, her father, had died.
Trapped in a hospital bed, hooked up to a respirator that by today’s standards looks impossibly antiquated, he can’t bear what he has become. He won’t even look at his infant son.
But like the young Princess Elizabeth, Diana Cavendish seems to be hewn from one enormous stiff upper lip.She does not fall apart because she cannot. She will take Robin and their baby boy back to England and start anew, treating the worst that life can throw at her with as much grace as she treated the best.
The producer of Breathe is Jonathan Cavendish, who was that baby boy.
This film is his parents’ story and he deserves to be inordinately proud of it, because it is not mawkish or even overly sentimental, as in lesser directorial hands it might have been.
The director is Andy Serkis — better known for his work in front of the camera as the so-called king of motion-capture, the technology that allowed him, so brilliantly, to inhabit Caesar in the Planet Of The Apes films, and Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings series.
Here, with the help of an excellent screenplay by William Nicholson (who explored similar territory in his play Shadowlands), he has mastered what you might call emotion-capture.
Breathe is a searingly moving, impeccably sensitive and, at times, very funny depiction of a uniquely British response to dreadful adversity.
it’s the truth of this remarkable story that makes it so intensely affecting, combined with the perfection of both lead performances.
Garfield and Foy have both done plenty of fine work in the past, but none of it better than this. The steady love but evolving relationship between Robin and Diana seems utterly real.
I hope the folk who dish out acting awards don’t mind being reminded how much they seem to love portrayals of extreme disability by able-bodied actors.
Daniel Day-Lewis and Eddie Redmayne already have Oscars to show for it, but that’s no reason why Garfield shouldn’t be in the running as well.
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