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Breathe review: Andrew Garfield knuckles down in a punishingly twee biopic

Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy in Breathe
Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy in Breathe

Dir: Andy Serkis; Starring: Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Tom Hollander, Hugh Bonneville, Ed Speleers, Stephen Mangan, Diana Rigg. 12A cert, 117 mins

If the name Robin Cavendish doesn’t ring a bell, here comes Breathe to set you wearisomely straight. A tea-broker who contracted polio in Kenya in the late 1950s, just a year into married life, the paralysed Cavendish was put on a respirator and given months to live – but more than 20 years later, thanks to a wholegrain blend of resourcefulness, gumption and an upper lip so stiff it could have supported his own bodyweight, he was still going strong. 

Andy Serkis’s directorial debut initially promises to be a rare shot at sincere romantic melodrama based on Cavendish’s story. Its opening five minutes, which introduce Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy as the young Robin and his wife-to-be Diana, feature swoony strings, an elegant title font, and its central couple dancing to a crackling gramophone at sunset. 

But depressingly, it very quickly turns out to be a punishingly twee instructional biopic, in which a testing human life is boiled down into the screen equivalent of a non-prescription pick-me-up. Think The Theory of Everything without a science bit to concentrate on, let alone the scope for transformative acting seized on by Eddie Redmayne in that film, with famously Oscar and Bafta-winning results.

You might assume the latter must have been what caught Serkis’s eye about this project, and perhaps it did. The actor’s own screen transformations – most notably in the Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes trilogies, in mesmeric half-digital guises – are recent high watermarks for physical performance in the cinema.

Yet there’s nothing in Breathe that taps into Serkis’s very particular expertise. Despite the film playing out across multiple decades, there’s never much of a sense that any of its characters are ageing, unless you count some unfortunate old-age prosthetics towards the end that make Garfield’s face look like a big toe in a cravat. 

That’s why it’s easy to feel the film owes its existence more to its director’s personal connection to the source material. Serkis’s Ealing-based production company The Imaginarium was co-founded by John Cavendish, who’s not only the producer of Breathe but also its its main character’s real-life son. And intentionally or not, the entire project has the claggy consistency of tribute: it coddles everyone involved, including us, and is so rose-tinted you might as well be watching through Turkish Delight.

Cavendish himself spends most of the film propped up in bed, with Garfield dressed in a range of elegant pyjamas, alternately pulling strained expressions of pluck and anguish. And Foy, so rivetingly nuanced as the young Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s The Crown, just gamely beetles about the place as his faithful wife, contending with doubting doctors and frazzled mobile respirator batteries.

Andrew Garfield in Breathe
Andrew Garfield in Breathe

But this presumably at-least-occasionally- trying existence, which takes the couple from a Nairobi field hospital to their new home in England and later on various escapades around Europe, is just something both of them get on with, hand in hand.

That’s a nice line in an obituary, but not the soul of an engaging drama – and perhaps because of its producer’s very personal proximity to its subject, Breathe never quite seems to grasp that three minutes shy of two hours of everyone heroically knuckling down isn’t much to watch.

andrew garfield and claire foy
Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy

The endless supply of invariably well-meaning supporting characters only adds to the sense that you’re sitting through a mealy-mouthed tribute – in Tom Hollander’s case, twice over, given he’s playing identical twins – although Hugh Bonneville, who occasionally chimes in as the scientist who designs Cavendish’s wheelchair, is a rare exception.

Breathe didn’t have to be a film that unflinchingly laid bare the trials of the Cavendishes’ existence, but it might have at least had the courage to be something. Instead, whenever it lands on a purpose, it can’t seem to shake it off quickly enough.

The 75 best British films of all time
The 75 best British films of all time

William Nicholson’s screenplay momentarily nibbles at a couple of juicy themes – the necessary visibility of disabled people, quality of life versus quantity of life – but scuttles off in fright each time, while the notion that Diana might have forgone some of her own dreams and desires in order to become a stagehand in her husband’s life is glossed over in a few “Oh, don’t worry about me, darling” exchanges that sell her character insultingly short. A sceptical hospital chief is written as conveniently racist. Everything slips along a little too comfortably for comfort.

“You could at least have the decency to be at the point of death,” Bonneville’s character drily jibes, when he comes to Cavendish’s rescue during a roadside breakdown in Spain, only to find the crisis has turned into an impromptu fiesta, with tapas, flamenco-dancing locals, and coloured fairy lights. The actor sells the joke well, but you can’t help but notice it strikes an unfortunate chord.