The Salt Path

dir: Marianne Elliot

2025

Talk about missing the boat on something…

I don’t even really know if it’s possible to talk about this flick without mentioning or being mindful of the firestorm that arose a month after this flick appeared in cinemas, even Australian cinemas, though admittedly of the arthouse kind. Your Dendys, your Novas, your Lidos, your Palace Cinemas; your places where oldies go to in droves and young people avoid with a shudder.

For almost a month they would have been packing the oldies in, probably overselling seats and stacking them up to the rafters as they watched on in salty joy as grateful tears streaked down their leathery faces, revelling as they were in the heartfelt experiences of Raynor Winn and her husband Moth as life dealt them bad card after bad card and they just kept trucking on, kept walking that salty Cornwall path, not letting the world get them down.

Maybe some of them, the cinema patrons, that is, were clutching one of Raynor Winn’s many books to their chests as they dutifully filed in to the theatre, seeing as they have been bestselling books. To them, the legions of the dusty faithful, they just wanted to hear and see and feel all the things the books had given them thus far in black and white paper form, but now with people and images and music etc.

They would have dried their tears on the pages of her memoirs, content that they’d just watched a wonderful pair of actors, being the great Gillian Anderson and the pretty okay Jason Isaacs, bring to life these heroic characters of Raynor and Moth, two absolute troopers, two modern day saints who walk amongst the rest of us lowly scum.

Maybe, just maybe, some of them might have thought to themselves, while watching the flick, what the fuck kind of names Raynor and Moth actually are? They also might think, in the beginning, and in the often quoted yet confusing outcome of a certain court trial that left them homeless, “Well, how did that work?” And then one might wonder, as the middle aged couple are being evicted from their middle class house, and seemingly at random decide to hike a 600 mile track along the coast because Raynor saw a hiking book about the path at the last minute, “Is that the only thing you could have done at the time?”

As they attend a specialist appointment, and the specialist tells the couple that Moth has a neuro-degenerative condition that’s not going to get better with time, and both members of the couple just say things like “that can’t be true, I don’t believe it”, did any of the faithful wonder to themselves “I wonder if that would have worked when I was diagnosed with…” Because in my limited experience of medical matters, denial rarely ever seemed to be much of a cure, right up there with placebos and naturopathic panaceas and whiskey. Lots of whiskey.

I don’t want to make light of what this couple went through. I mean, regardless of the circumstances, losing your home when you’re in your 50-60s would not be a walk in the park. It wouldn’t even be a walk along the coast of Cornwall, but it would certainly lay you low. Being homeless and having no money makes you a stateless person, an unperson in the eyes of many, and despite these people being played by attractive Hollywood types like Anderson and Isaacs, they are still occasionally treated by people and looked at onscreen like they’re something scrapped off the bottom of one’s shoe.

So, sure, it’s reasonable for us to maybe think “they could have tried something else other than to subject themselves to this torment for no reason”, but that’s us just being difficult. Of course they had to go on this death march. How else would they have earned the right to become rich again? They suffered for our satisfaction – in suffering, they earned the right to turn their story into a bestselling book / successful film.

If I lost my house and ended up homeless, I daresay no-one would give a shit. But then I’m not a talented writer, you might say, and that would be accurate, painful but accurate. There would have to be a compelling reason for a publisher to think my story would somehow resonate with audiences, so I’d have to find ways to depict my struggles on the streets, on the beaches or on the coasts that connected with people on a massive scale, perhaps through some great, grand gesture? Maybe I was homeless, but I climbed Mount… Kosciusko? Mount Disappointment? Mount Beauty? With no gear, or boots, or socks even?

But how would I do that, since those aren’t real achievements, and there are thousands of homeless people in Melbourne, and I don’t see editors from Random House or Simon & Shuster or Penguin fighting each other in the streets in-between trying to sign contracts with the homeless people who don’t look as timelessly elegant as Gillian Anderson, but still have a compelling story about triumphing over adversity or at least getting by with an overbite, or a stubbed toe, something at least.

I know, what if I take a leaf from Belle Gibson’s life story, and pretend that I’ve got cancer / a horrible neuro-degenerative disease, and that I somehow overcame it through the grace of God, hitting the weights, saying my prayers, and going nigh-nighs on the beautiful sands of St Kilda beach, with nature, and not yucky Western medicine, doing the healing?

Now that would get the great publishing houses interested!

Okay, so now we’re in a world where the people that looked into it think that this memoir is complete bullshit. So what? If Chloe Hadjimatheou from The Observer hadn’t conducted a rigorous investigation that revealed almost everything Raynor Winn, sorry, Sally Walker, said about her life and how she lost her house was bullshit, I would have suspected it just by watching this flick.

Almost anything in this script, almost anything that isn’t Anderson and Isaacs just being wherever they are, feels so contrived, so unlikely that I would have just assumed it was all fiction anyway. If there’s anything enjoyable about this flick, it’s only the two central performances, which is mostly just us watching them walking about, and the actual footage of the Cornish countryside, which is gorgeous, utterly gorgeous. When Raynor gives her only fiver to a scrounging teenager with a shitty boyfriend, as if to underline what a fucking saint she is, pre-finding out I would have just rolled my eyes and thought “sure you did.”

Now, with the benefit of perfect knowledge into their entire existences and their very souls, I would probably assume that something like that situation happened, but that Raynor and Moth probably beat up a child and stole the money from her pockets she was going to spend on an ice cream instead.

Oh, that’s so unfair, but that’s the problem with liars: when caught in a lie, their recourse is “okay, so we lied about that, but not about this”. And when you find out that that was bullshit too, they’ll say “well okay, that was bullshit too, but not this!” You can’t win against people like that. They eventually say things like “well, it might not be actually true, but it’s our emotional truth”, and you might just find that you’ve lost your will to live.

I don’t want to have to think about that kind of stuff when I’m watching a film about people walking a difficult path. They’re actors, after all. You don’t hear Gillian Anderson or Jason Isaacs claiming that they actually walked the whole 600 miles in order to convey all that credibly in the film. I have no doubt they did a lot of walking, I mean, that’s like a lot of the film, but let’s not pretend that it’s the same thing. And to their credit, they are not claiming they did. Just that they’re trying to honour the emotional truth of the story.

I do like these sorts of films, I really do. They are not a genre in themselves, not just yet, because a film in which people do a lot of walking (like, uh, Fellowship of the Ring), is not really in the same wheelhouse as a film where a father honours his dead son by walking the El Camino de Santiago in Spain (as in the Emilio Estevez film The Way, starring his father Martin Sheen).

Those films are about the landscape, they are about people suffering a bit but not so much that they look like masochists (except when it’s a walk to freedom out of geographical or totalitarian horror, like The Way Back, where prisoners flee the gulag), they are about the people they meet along the way and the experiences they have, both good and bad, because what could be a better analogy for life itself?

We love a good journey. We crave it. It’s the basis of storytelling. A person starts their journey, their walk, and they’re this way or that, but by the end of it, they’re transformed.

Because this flick just never quits, there’s such a contrived moment at the end where some random older woman walks past the couple, tells them how great they are, how salty, how much they’ve been transformed by their journey (she has no fucking idea: they’ve gone from the poor house to the penthouse once the money from the sales rolls right in!!!), and you’re like “fuck you, you fantasists.”

That’s not the end of the movie for me. It could have, should have just ended once Raynor / Sally listens to her husband say out of absolute fucking nowhere “I’ve decided I’m going to go and study sustainable farming!”, and then leaves the hut they were taking a brief breather in, and instead of saying “how the fuck are we meant to afford that?” she says, in lieu of underlining the flick’s theme, that even if they lost everything, they at least had each other, she mutters “You’re my home”, and that’s when the tears started and should have ended.

This is not a good flick, and I daresay no-one should give these appalling people any more of their hard earned cash, but you do need to see it, as an example of utterly shameless effrontery, and just how people can rewrite their own histories and make themselves the heroes no matter how many crimes they committed.

Now that’s courage. That’s resilience.

6 times at this stage I don’t even believe she drove that distance let alone walked it out of 10

--
“Rogues, vagabonds and vagrants: however you classify the homeless, in the summer of 2013 we became two of their number.” – where some see challenges, the truly great see opportunities - The Salt Path