Those impatient with high-end Britfilm period product might worry that this movie takes a rather picturesque view of disability issues, and for the first 20 minutes I came pretty close to this standpoint myself. But you have to give Breathe time to let its charm and its heartfelt decency grow on you. The film is about an important figure in the history of how we think about and respect disabled people – the wheelchair-use pioneer and polio survivor Robin Cavendish (whose son Jonathan is the movie’s producer).
Andy Serkis makes his debut as director, working from a robust screenplay by William Nicholson. Andrew Garfield plays Cavendish, a rather dashing fellow in the 1950s who zooms around the place in his sports car and plays a splendid game of cricket, hitting a six that breaks the teacups set out by the clubhouse and roguishly calling out: “Sorry!” He spots a beautiful young woman among the spectators: Diana Blacker, played by Claire Foy. It’s love at first sight, and marriage soon afterwards, and then a rather memsahib-like existence for her in Kenya (pronounced Keen-ya) because Cavendish is a “tea broker” there.
But then one day Cavendish feels faint and collapses: he has polio, is paralysed from the neck down, and after he is brought back to England, the medical establishment curtly tells Diana not to expect her husband to live any more than a few months, and only as a prostrate patient who must be passive and obedient. But armed with love and courage, the Cavendishes demand more of existence than this, and Robin defies the grumpy doctors by using a new respirator-wheelchair invented especially for him. It is possible that for this role, Garfield studied Kenneth More playing the disabled Air Force pilot Douglas Bader in the biopic Reach for the Sky.
It’s a valuable and touching story, and it is extraordinary to think that so recently, disabled people in this position were treated like living corpses, there to be clinically warehoused and studied, and told to be grateful and mute. There is a chilling scene in which Cavendish and his friends are taken to see a facility in Germany that turns out to be some Kubrickian living morgue: white, brightly lit, with patients entombed in state-of-the-art medical sarcophagi.
As for the central relationship, it is a matter of getting on with it, keeping love alive in the little things and staying cheerful in a very British way – which I’m sure is a fair depiction of exactly how the Cavendishes coped. There is a delicate allusion to what might be called their conjugal intimacy – Robin says it is a matter of Diana “doing all the work” – although the business of other bodily functions is not shown. The lump-in-the-throat seriousness is offset with fun small roles, principally for Tom Hollander, who plays both Diana’s twin brothers and provides some much-needed irony and cynicism. Hugh Bonneville has some fun with the role of scientist Teddy Hall, who invents Robin’s wheelchair.
The problem is that there is not much light and shade in the Cavendishes themselves – and certainly not with Diana, at times a rather thankless role for Foy (given far less to chew on here than as the Queen in the Netflix series The Crown). She is loyal, loving, often exasperated and sometimes angry – but it is still a pretty narrow emotional bandwidth. Robin has his own dark night of the soul, just after he is told that he will not walk again, but it is always clear that this bitterness is only temporary.
And those who wonder if the British film industry will tackle the issue of Kenya and the Mau Mau uprising may not be entirely happy with the way that is invoked: a rather saucer-eyed anecdote around the Kenyan camp-fire about Mau Mau prisoners choosing a Zen-willed suicide for themselves in detention camps. Most accounts suggest Mau Mau prisoners died rather more brutally than that, yet this quaint image is later revived to evoke Robin’s own stoicism when his own condition becomes too much to bear.
At all events, Breathe is an affecting account of the quiet courage needed to battle the deadly spores of discrimination and condescension that came with polio.
