The ballad of wallis island

May 2 – 8

Held over!

7 pm
1:30 pm Sunday Matinée

Comedy / Drama / Music
Rated PG – 1h 30m

The Ballad of Wallis Island is the loveliest movie of the year (so far). It’s never a bad time for a film like “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” but at the moment it feels like a much-needed balm. Modest in scope and made with the lightest of touch, not unlike the lovely folk songs that populate its soundtrack, it’s also deceptively powerful: A gentle ode to moving on, in quirky packaging. The movie has many virtues: two multilayered lead performances, three fine supporting turns, excellent original songs, and gorgeous scenery. If you’d like to feel a little better about humanity, you should seek out this film.

The Ballad of Wallis Island centers on two demoralized men: Charles (Tim Key), a widowed lottery winner living on the titular (but fictional) Welsh island, and Herb (Tom Basden), a successful musician whose creative peak has long since passed. As Herb’s biggest fan, Charles has hired the singer-songwriter to spend a few days with him and play a gig for “less than a hundred” spectators, but the host has prepared surprises for his reluctant guest with the design of engineering a reunion. Basden displays exemplary comic restraint. He transcends the straight-man role by embodying creative exhaustion and midlife angst. A lesser actor (and writer) might overreact to Charles’s well-intentioned but intrusive antics, but as Herb, Basden seems too tired and disappointed in himself to muster much rage. Key’s performance as Charles is equally impressive. Exasperating Herb with endless banter, Charles reveals his vulnerability and desolation.

The songs, too, are best experienced in the cinema. Basden wrote them all, and he sings and accompanies himself on guitar exquisitely, occasionally joined on vocals by Mulligan. If you enjoy the songs in “Once” and other musical films by John Carney but wish the tunes had more subtlety, then The Ballad of Wallis Island is a film you will savor. The lyrics are earnest, insightful, and rarely sappy. At one point, Charles comments that the singing of Herb and Nell (Mulligan) singing “leaves [him] wanting more,” and the film indeed takes that tack with the music, never lingering too long on any performance or diverting attention from the characters’ compelling problems.

Love can be found and lasting connections can be made even in a world drowning in chaos and indecision. This is the song that The Ballad of Wallis Island triumphantly sings. It’s one worth playing on repeat.