So my wife and I are inveterate backpackers—the seasoned, often bedraggled kind. We’ve backpacked in many locations from Denali National Park in Alaska (perhaps the “wildest” backcountry) to Yellowstone and the Wind Rivers in Wyoming and many others. But truth is we don’t enjoy carrying heavy packs on our back. That’s the hard part. Sometimes the miserable part. (Depends on how far you have to go.) The reward, however, is always worth it: We backpack to reach beautiful, untrammeled and uncrowded locales. (Yellowstone is our favorite, have done about a dozen pack trips there.)
Shouldering the packs is always a chore. Sure, we try to pack lightweight and carry ultra-lightweight tent etc, but usually for a weeklong adventure my pack would be around fifty pounds. That’s a third of my weight and about as much as I want to lug. Most movies that depict backpacking are silly, fake, or foolish. You can always tell the actors don’t have much weight in their packs. They stand so straight! And when they stop they don’t drop their backpacks asap. I always suspect the packs are filled with Styrofoam peanuts. They often seem as if filmed by people who have never or very seldom carried a pack for miles. Which is where last year’s excellent film The Salt Path deserves a mention.
While I usually try to avoid spoilers, I should note this is most definitely not a thriller, murder-mystery, horror, scifi, or action-adventure flick. No demon strippers or flying monkeys either. It’s quiet, thoughtful, compassionate, and touching. There are some surprises I won’t reveal. But the core of the film, and the engine of its charm and emotional appeal, is an aging, late-Middle-Age couple (they have grown children) who embark on the “Salt Path”—a backpacking trail that follows the coast of England for several hundred miles.
Opposed to the fake backpacking films I rant about, the packing depicted in the film seems surprisingly realistic. For one thing, it looks hard. The husband is played by Jason Isaacs, of recent White Lotus fame, season three in Thailand. (He played the father who decides to kill his family due to financial collapse.) He struggles at backpacking more than I ever have, and he has to go miles and miles. I felt sorry for him from his first limping steps. The wife is played by Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame, although that seems dismissive: She’s been in many films and television since that Nineties show, including Sex Education and The Crown—in which she played Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher. She is remarkably stoic in their physical travels and travails. Anderson does a good job of not milking the difficulty, but not sugar-coating it either.
Yet the film is not only or even primarily about “backpacking.” As I’ve noted in my intro, I think of carrying heavy packs as just a means to an end. The film touches on our modern economic perils, on companionship, on honor and dignity, and on how to survive and even prevail when the going gets tough. It’s touching and heartfelt. A rare commodity these days. We watched this movie out of sheer chance, and I’ve remembered it more fondly than most films I saw last year. Here’s a comparison: One Battle After Another is being touted as this year’s Best Picture; The Salt Path is better.
Note this is a true story. That adds some zing to the suffering and the struggle of the couple. Based on the eponymous book by Raynor Winn, which is touted as an International Best Seller and the Best Book of 2019 by NPR’s Book Concierge.
