A widower takes a nostalgic journey from John o’Groats to Land’s End using his free bus pass in a well-acted but overly sentimental film
Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this weirdly unreal and sentimental Britmovie in the last-journey-with-someone’s-ashes genre. But it is certainly acted with commitment and integrity by Timothy Spall, who plays an old, sick widower courageously making his peace with the past.
Spall is Tom, a retired engineer who lives in John o’Groats in the northerly tip of Scotland; he and his late wife, Mary – a decent cameo for Phyllis Logan – once lived as a young married couple in Land’s End (that is: England’s most southerly point) but came to settle up there because they wanted to put as much geographical and emotional distance as possible between them and an awful tragedy that struck them in the first year of their marriage. (Young Mary and Tom are played in sepia-ish flashback by Natalie Mitson and Ben Ewing.) After Mary’s death, Tom takes it into his head to make an epic journey back down through Britain to Land’s End, using only local bus routes on his free bus pass, like Forrest Gump’s British grandpa.