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7 min read

Two terrible travelogues in search of their storylines

Yaroslav Walker would rather get to a monastery than recommend these threequels.
A family arrive at an overnight stay, enter a room and look around uncertainly
The cast of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 look for its storyline.
Universal Pictures.

Welcoming a baby boy to my family (pause for applause) has left my September rather busy, and I couldn’t face anything too meaty and intelligent and subtle in my viewing: I wanted some simple fare that would be both entertaining and familiar. I was, therefore, delighted to see that September was a month of ‘threequels’. I am a big fan of both My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Equalizer; they are uncomplicated and inviting, funny and charming, doing what they do (romantic comedy/culture-clash/action/man-against-the-world) efficiently and good-naturedly… 

Their third instalments fail spectacularly. 

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is neither charming nor funny, and it hardly has any wedding in it. The first instalment was a delightful example of a classic American movie trope: culture clash between the first and second generation immigrant communities that make up the country. Tula Portokalos falls in love with a handsome WASP, while her family want her to marry a nice Greek boy. As they prepare to marry, Nick (the fiancé) has to assimilate to the Greek way of living (and really rather likes it) and Tula comes to learn to be far more accepting of her heritage and her family. Part two is less funny and less engaging – a convoluted plot about the mother and father of Tula never being truly married, and having a later-life wedding – but revisits the old favourite characters, and introduces a daughter to take up the ‘growing-pains-culture-clash’ dynamic (Tula repeating her father’s iconic line in a nice way).  

My Big Fat 3k Wedding has now divested itself of all humour and winsomeness. Gus (the patriarch) is dead, and his widow may have dementia. It was his dying wish that his children take his old diary and hand it over to his three childhood friends. Its Holiday on the Buses then. Its ‘we-have-run-out-of-ideas’ so let’s go abroad. It’s a travelogue rather than a rom-com, focused on giving you an lovely panoramic shot of provincial Greek living. That aspect of it is fairly spectacular: the cliffs, the sea, the distressed cottages with just the right amount of cracked plaster and whitewash…ah, 90 minutes of that would’ve been lovely. Instead, the truly great character of the Greek countryside is constantly sidelined by turgid dialogue and performances that are either flatter than a pita or a gurning mess better suited to children’s television. There is one good joke delivered in such a staccato as to miss the punchline, half of the original characters are absent, and the wedding comes out of nowhere and doesn’t have any impact. 

The truly frustrating thing is that there seems to be no central theme, no thrust, no point. The first was a classic rom-com, with elements of culture clash and ugly duckling and mad families. The second was about aging and how parenting changes you. 3k Wedding has too many themes and none. A storyline about having a parent with dementia, ignored. A story about grief, barely given the time of day. A story about forbidden love and refugees and the migrant crisis, there only when convenient. A story about bucolic provinciality coping with a 21st century world, there only in snatches. The closest thing to a coherent theme is that of culture and soil and homeland having a pull and a power on even those who grew up across an ocean, and that is a genuinely interesting idea to explore…then a gurn and a non-joke and a shot of a goat…its rubbish. 

1.5 stars. 

The Equalizer 3

A serious looking man in black sits pensively on a carved chair.
The Equalizer will not be happy with this review.

A travelogue at the start of the month and one at the end with The Equalizer 3. 3qualizer is a second reuniting of star Denzel Washington and director Antoine Fuqua, who made some cinematic magic with the first film. Denzel is Robert McCall, an expert government assassin who can kill you within 9 seconds, and that’s without a weapon in his hand. McCall starts the first film adrift, his wife has died and he is retired and now he has no direction or purpose. His spark of life is reignited when he meets a young prostitute, takes pity on her, and proceeds to kill every Russian mobster who has ever even looked at her.  

It is glorious. McCall’s obsessive-compulsive precision is turned into a joyous conceit where he can say exactly how long it will take him to kill every person in the room. It is pacy, it is non-stop, with a simple yet effective plot and a mesmerising Denzel performance (when is he anything less!?). The second instalment is less effective, with a more meandering plot, but still good fun. McCall has decided he will find meaning in his later life by putting his skills to the service of the underdog. He is The Equalizer, cutting villains down to size and bringing justice to the lowly. He takes on a fatherly duty with a young man who is in danger of joining a gang, and he executes all the bad men who killed his oldest friend.  

3qualizer is…in Italy. Why is it in Italy? No idea. Perhaps McCall has caused too much property damage in the US. McCall is sitting in a chair in a wine cellar in Sicily. A bad man walks in. He informs him how many seconds it would take and then dispatches the rotters. As he is leaving he is shot (in the buttocks?) by the young son of the chief baddy. He drives as far as the Amalfi Coast where he is saved by a local policeman and a local doctor. Then…he goes for walks. He enjoys Italian coffee. He meets the locals. He eats pasta. He becomes both dull and unbearably quirky at the same time.  

There is no real plot. Mafiosi terrorise the town for no discernible reason. McCall kills them. More Mafiosi come. McCall kills them. Two…two action scenes after the wine cellar, that is all I counted. When the film ended I had to do a double take and wonder if I’d fallen asleep. I’m not suggesting the first two films were Barry Lyndon, but they had a plot with some twists and turns – 3qualizer has a whole lot of scenery. Like Greece, the Amalfi Coast looks gorgeous, but I didn’t pay my money to watch an extended message by the Italian tourist board.  

There’s a side-story about a CIA agent cutting her teeth on the fallout of the Sicily shootout…why? Mysterious as McCall’s original presence there. Nothing makes any sense or connects and it's just as turgid as 3k Wedding, which is far worse a sin for an action movie to commit. So you know, both questions are answered at the end of the film and the answers relate to nothing, NOTHING we see in the main body of the film. 

McCall’s story ends with him being embraced by the villagers and him embracing them…? I HAVE NO IDEA! It is unclear and sloppy, and (perhaps because of the boredom he must have felt while filming) Denzel Washington has turned McCall’s dangerous precision into a series of tics and twitches which are simply alarming.  

1 star. 

Two very disappointing cinematic outings which, despite being very different genres, make the same errors. Perhaps because they seem to be scrabbling to explore the same theme. What is home? What does it mean to be home and know you are home? What does it mean to be comfortable and accepted and know yourself as yourself in the place that you are? Tula seems to be trying to understand this and explore the entire concept of the ‘immigrant mindset’ by going to Greece to see her father’s village…I think this is what she is doing, again, the film makes it hard to understand its own themes. McCall is a man who has no home – his career was spent travelling (alienated from his home soil), his wife is dead (alienated from his family), and he is a man who has killed too many people (alienated from himself). Perhaps a small fishing village will give him the simplicity of life that can save his sense of self. 

Both Tula and McCall start to unravel their existential crises by fleeing the big city, embracing quieter and humbler surroundings, and coming to understand the nature of community that is symbiotic and self-giving and joyous (something McCall has never had, and something Tula has struggled with in terms of her own family). In both, there is something of a monastic pattern. Coming away from distraction and metropolitan living and building a community of reciprocity in the wilderness, this is the aboriginal pattern of life for the monk and the nun – from St Anthony in Egypt to St Benedict in Italy, Christians in the East and West have benefited greatly from the prayers and example of holy men and women who live the ‘religious life’. 

The great insights of monastic living – simpler living of work and rest in intentional community where one lives from the whole as much as for the self – are having a bit of a come-back in secular society. Whether it is the meditative practice of the Desert Fathers entering mindfulness manuals, or the Rule of St Benedict (ordering the life in community for a Benedictine monk) being used to train managers in major companies, the wisdom of monasticism has endured even into the 21st century post-Christian world. Tula and McCall find some peace in this wisdom; they don’t embrace the religious life, but they do find comfort and stillness and real joy in a life that slows its pace and opens itself up to a community of service and sacrifice and love. 3k Wedding might symbolise this with the presence of an actual monk in the film…doubtful, but one can hope. 

This is an insight far better expressed by reading about monasticism. Do that, rather than watch these films. They’re rubbish.

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Purpose
8 min read

You may never take the Salt Path but here's why the tale makes sense

Kindness runs deep in the architecture of reality.

Roger Standing

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London. 

A hiking couple sit on the grass next to a pack.
Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
BBC Films.

The Salt Path is a phenomenon.  

An internationally best-selling book and now a movie starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. How is it that a memoir of a middle-aged couple walking the South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset, via Land’s End, has had such an impact? 

Well, it’s because it resonates. It rings true. It’s about life as we know it, even if we haven’t hiked the 630 miles of the path from start to finish. A journey that is also, incidentally, the equivalent of climbing Mt Everest four times over. 

In the events leading up to their walk Raynor (Ray) and Moth Winn are dealt a series of body blows. They’re left bankrupt and homeless empty-nesters, struggling to come to terms with Moth’s deteriorating health.  

It was just as the bailiffs were seeking to gain access to their farm and take possession of it that Ray spotted an old book, 500 Hundred Mile Walkies, and took inspiration. 

‘We could just walk.’ 

And that’s what they did. 

So, what are the truths about life and our human experience that this story opens up for us? 

Life is precarious  

Bad stuff happens. Sometimes we bring it on ourselves, the consequence of wrong or ill-judged decisions. Other times it is thoroughly undeserved. Life turns around and bites us, hard. We’re left with our heads numb and spinning round with the persistent but unanswered question, ‘why me?’ 

For the Winns, an investment in the business of a trusted, life-long friend failed. The deal he structured left them responsible for the debts of his company. The end of a prolonged legal battle meant they lost everything, their farm, their home, their business, and the life-long friend. 

The same week also found them in a hospital in Liverpool getting the diagnosis for Moth’s chronic shoulder pain. It was not the suspected nerve damage, but rather the fatal neurological condition corticobasal degeneration. CBD. A diagnosis that was untreatable and only finally confirmed postmortem. 

Whether it’s the South West Coast Path or the familiar details of our own life, we can never fully anticipate tomorrow. We do not know what lies behind the next headland or what unwelcome surprises life may spring on us. No, we need to live in the moment. It’s pointless worrying about tomorrow and we ought to let it worry about itself. We can only live in today. As Ray reflected towards the end of their time on the path: 

“This second in the millions of seconds was the only one, the only one that we could live in.” 

Who am I, really? 

Early in the book Ray recalls: 

“I once heard a lecture by Stephen Hawking, when he said, ‘It’s the past that tells us who we are. Without it we lose our identity.’ Perhaps I was trying to lose my identity, so I could invent a new one.” 

Who are we when everything is stripped away? What defines us? Homeless and jobless, questions about where we’re from and what we do are not only awkward, they also create an existential void.  

Often mistaken for tramps, Ray and Moth noticed people treating them differently. Some quietly moved away, others were more forthright, “disgusting!” But the judgement of others does not define who we are. Yet, who actually were they in this new world of theirs?  

And then there’s the impact of failing health. Each stage of deterioration promising to erode what can be physically done and requiring a redefinition until there is nothing left at all.  

Yet identity is deeper than that. It is at the core of who we are, at the very heart of us. It is the sum of our experiences and choices, our successes and failures, of what we have gladly embraced and that which life has unexpectedly thrown at us. We are unique individuals with intrinsic value, worth and dignity. People who love and are loved. 

At the end of the path Ray muses: 

“Most people go through their whole lives without answering their own questions: What am I, who do I have within me? The big stuff. What a waste.” 

I guess that’s one of the attractions of making space to walk. To lose the distractions and busyness of our over-complicated lives for self-discovery to break in. 

One step at a time 

How do you get your head around walking 630 miles? How can you appreciate the demands of climbing unknown hills and cliffs and navigating their gullies and ravines.  

On top of the terrain there’s the notorious English weather to negotiate. With little money and only a tent for respite: when it rains you get wet and stay wet, when it’s cold, you shiver and put on as many layers as you can. Even in August it can be challenging. 

Walk, eat, sleep, repeat. 

Sometimes the only thing to do is put one foot in front of the other.  

“Each step had its own resonance, its moment of power or failure. That step, and the next and the next and the next, was the reason and the future. … each day survived a reason to live through the next.” 

There is always agency. There is always the opportunity to choose today which path to travel and which attitude to serve. To give in or go on, to be a defeatist or hopeful, complaining or generous, those choices are always there, even when they’re limited. Even in the wake of unfair decisions and unexpected tragedy, we choose today the way we take. And sometimes that’s all we can muster. 

The kindness of strangers 

Ray and Moth’s story is littered with moments of kindness and warmth. From the lovelorn waitress who sneaks them the day’s leftover pasties to the generosity of a hippie commune there is a recurring theme that echoes an underlying goodness in the nature of people. And often it is those with the least who prove to be the most open-handed and thoughtful. 

On more than one occasion the Winn’s themselves share from their own meagre supply of food, especially their precious fudge bars, with those in a more uncertain state than their own. On another occasion they step into a tense and potentially violent situation with a young woman, Sealy, the subject of an abusive relationship. They offer her company and a way out, ultimately paying for her £5 bus journey to get away to family. 

There is something heartwarming about kindness, something elevating. Both the giver and the receiver feel encouraged, lighter, happier. The abiding truth continues to stand the test of time that it is ‘better to give than to receive’.  

Strangely, watching these scenes play out in my local Showcase Cinema was an uplifting and inspiring experience. You can never predict or properly anticipate when a tear will unexpectedly present itself to the corner of your eye. I suspect that kindness runs more deeply in the nature of things than we comprehend. It is part of the deep architecture of reality.

Love and relationship in tough times 

When it comes down to it, The Salt Path is about Ray’s relationship with Moth. How they face an unimaginably difficult set of circumstances and find a way through together. This is a profoundly hopeful story. And from it we can draw hope too. 

There was nothing religious about what they were doing, “It’s not a pilgrimage. Is it?”  

At one level it is purely a response to desperation. But in the midst of it all they have each other. Thirty-two years together, having begun their relationship when Ray was 18, they are still deeply in love. They epitomise the values enshrined in the marriage vows. 

“… to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part …” 

This is not slushy sentimentality but rather love that proves itself in the face of the onslaught of ‘worse … poorer … sickness … death’. 

The conclusion of their journey led Ray to a realisation: “I was home, there was nothing left to search for, he was my home.” As the ancient poet wrote: 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart,  

as a seal upon your arm; 

for love is strong as death, 

passion fierce as the grave. 

Its flashes are flashes of fire, 

a raging flame. 

 

Many waters cannot quench love, 

neither can floods drown it. 

If one offered for love 

all the wealth of one's house, 

it would be utterly scorned.” 

(Song of Solomon) 

That’s it then. The book and the movie work because they reflect back to us the life we know, the lives we live. Yes, they’re in high relief in the choices that Ray and Moth take, but that clarifies things for us. Most of us won’t ever find ourselves in the position they were in, but we can empathise. Most of us would never think to do what they did even if we were. But for all that, we see, we understand and it makes sense. 

If you get a chance to see the film, then do. Gillian Anderson and Jeremy Isaacs are exceptionally good in their understated performances. The visual experience of the South West coast is everything you would expect it to be, sounding as majestic and immersive as if you were there. A real treat. 

For me, the most poignant and telling moment of the story happens at Lyme Regis. Moth says: 

“When it does come, the end, I want you to have me cremated. …keep me in a box somewhere, then when you die the kids can put you in, give us a shake and send us on our way … They can let us go on the coast, in the wind, and we’ll find the horizon together.” 

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