Faith, alcohol, trauma, and decades of unspoken hurt collide when a long-married couple travels to Amsterdam and begins questioning the life they have built together.
Any film starring legendary stage and screen award-winners Lesley Manville (English) and Ciarán Hinds (Northern Irish) will probably be first-rate. And as long-married couple Stella and Gerry, the two in “Midwinter Break” (now on Netflix) do not disappoint. Besides its stars, the movie also is indebted to director Polly Findlay, the 2017 novel (by Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty) it is based on, and supporting actors such as Niamh Cusack. All of them combine to make the film an excellent depiction of a late-stage marriage that is in trouble. How much so? Late in it, Stella tells her husband: “Gerry, when we get home [from Amsterdam], I'd like to put the flat up for sale, and . . . and then I want to get a place of my own.” (All film dialogue is taken from the filmscript.) The main trouble in the marriage is the gap between Stella’s Catholic religiosity and Gerry’s more skeptical, hard-drinking approach to life.
A pivotal moment in the couple’s life came around 1969-1970 when they were living in Belfast—see "The Film Belfast, Conflict, Migration, and Change" for a depiction of this time and ruminations about migrating out of Belfast. As Gerry tells a bartender, he was in Belfast before then, but “they [Protestants] burnt the entire bloody place to the ground. Petrol b*mb. No one was k*lled, thank God.” But Stella and Gerry moved to Glasgow.
In another conversation (with an Irish woman, Kathy, now living in Amsterdam), Stella provides more detail about that Belfort occasion:
It was our first summer together as husband and wife. I was pregnant. . . . Somebody was ambushing somebody else. I'm not sure how long I'd been running for, but all of a sudden, running became falling, and falling became . . . not moving. Sprawled. . . . I thought. . . . my waters must have broken. . . . I wanted to save my baby. . . . I said, ‘Lord...spare the child inside my womb . . . and I will devote the rest of my life to you. . . . Now . . . either it was a miracle or, as Gerry would say, the wee one must have ducked, but the b*llet passed . . . right through me, in one side and out the other. The only damage was that I wouldn't be able to have any more children. But that vow . . . that pledge . . . Kathy, that bargain. . . . there is a debt to be paid, and I've been looking for a way to pay it ever since.
On an earlier occasion, Gerry, referring to that same occasion, had said, “Stella, what happened to you was not miraculous. Right, it was perfectly within the bounds of possibilit. . . .”
The above words strikingly indicate the major difference between them. In their Amsterdam hotel—which she arranges as part of a “midwinter break” from Glasgow—she kneels down by their bed to say prayers while he sneaks an alcoholic drink in the bathroom. And she tells Kathy that she wants “to live a more valuable life. . . . To make a contribution.” So she “wanted to find out about the life here, you know. How someone like me might go about applying to become part of this.” (She mistakenly believes that Kathy is part of a Catholic religious order.)
Gerry, however, is more interested in alcohol than God. Late in the film, Stella expresses her dissatisfaction with his love of the bottle: “I can't go on living the way we do. I won't. I mean, the drinking. If I mention it, I'm a nag. If I don't, then I'm complicit. Do you not think I don't see it? Smell it? Yes, I suppose you could go on doing it behind my back until you've no liver left. But it's not just the drinking. It-it's the deception that goes along with it. It's ruining you. . . . You used to be so considerate. What's happened to you? These days, you're . . . you're nothing but appetite.”
Stella also complains about his words about her religious beliefs, his “poking fun and . . . the derision and scorn. I mean, it-it . . . It's like you-you have no idea how much you hurt me and . . . Or maybe you do and you just don't care anymore.”
Despite Stella’s dissatisfactions, she seems mollified by Gerry’s response when he tells her he will stop drinking and that “my being with you is the most wonderful thing there is. I adore you. And when I think of the future, all I think about is you. And I wish I had been there with you in Belfast, and I know that I'll never be able to share in what happened to you that day.”
Now widowed, but having been married for even longer than Stella and Gerry, I know that marital relations are a complex matter. Regardless of how hard either partner tries, one can never fully get inside one’s spouse’s head. Thus, Stella’s mollification seems possible, but it seemed to come too easily. That is about the only criticism I have for this otherwise top-notch movie.
