The Ballad of Wallis Island serves up Stephen King’s Misery with a mug of tea and a lemon scone on the side. Here, parasocial fandom might cause the odd faux pas, but everyone’s feet stay nicely attached – and, ultimately, it comes from a pure place, with the potential even to transform both the obsessee and their target into better people.
Former folk-rock star Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden), who’s since shifted into a hollower, more commercial space, turns up in a rickety boat to Wallis Island expecting an intimate, rural festival-type gig. Only, his hotel is actually the home of Charles (Tim Key); the audience is, well, Charles; and, unbeknownst to him, he’ll be reuniting for the first time in a decade or so with his ex-musical and romantic partner, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan). Director James Griffiths, Basden, and Key have here expanded on their 2007, Bafta-nominated short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. Key, a poet and comedian, has worked with Basden since their days in the Cambridge Footlights.
The time lapse serves them well. McGwyer Mortimer, it’s explained, were popular back in 2014, when indie-folk and unabashed sincerity were in their heyday (it’s worth noting Mulligan is married to the lead vocalist of Mumford & Sons, exactly the kind of band this film is reminiscing about). And the film’s original songs, all written by Basden and performed by him and Mulligan, are a perfect recreation of the era’s decorative yearning.
Key and Basden avoid turning their film into a nostalgic pat on the back for smug millennials convinced they lived through artistically superior times – the sense of loss here is strictly personal. Herb wonders whether he left his integrity behind with the woman whose contributions he never respected. Nell wonders whether she let all that belittling destroy her chance at a creative life. She makes chutney now in Portland, with her cheery and handsome husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), who happily shuffles off for a portion of the film to look at puffins. Charles mourns the love that first inspired his dedication to McGwyer Mortimer. Does he truly love the band, or does he just love the memories he made listening to them?
There’s an entire, craggy reef of sentimentality that The Ballad of Wallis Island is persistently in danger of crashing into. Charles is presented to us as a dad-joke machine powered by social incompetence (when Michael talks about Portland’s famous I-5 stretch of interstate highway, his hand almost compulsively jerks up for a high five). He’s also harbouring a buried crush on the island’s sole shopkeeper, Amanda (Sian Clifford).
So it’s a real feat that Griffith always manages to steer the boat away at just the right moment, choosing emotional nuance over manipulation. Despite Charles’s chattiness, it’s the smaller things that really do the talking here: how Key expresses emotion through a grimace, as if they’d become so repressed their resurfacing is physically painful to him; the moments Mulligan lets Nell’s performative breeziness falter slightly; the warm glow of G Magni Ágústsson’s seaside cinematography.
Everyone on Wallis Island is stuck in the past to some degree, and the film treats that fact as almost an inevitability of ageing. But when Herb, who hasn’t seen Nell in a decade, tries to hit her with the line, “I know you, I know you’re not happy,” he sounds like a narcissistic fool. We live wherever we live in our minds, but as we learn, the real problem is when we don’t accept that the world moves on, even if we haven’t.
Dir: James Griffiths. Starring: Tom Basden, Tim Key, Carey Mulligan, Sian Clifford, Akemnji Ndifornyen. Cert 12A, 100 minutes.
‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ is in cinemas from 30 May
