It’s been 29 years since movie audiences fell in love with Forrest Gump, the gold-hearted simpleton with the uncanny knack for being at the most pivotal moments in modern American history. If you remember the story, after Jenny turns down his marriage proposal and then disappears, Forrest embarks on a three-year run across the country, inspiring strangers along the way. The new British film, THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY, has a somewhat similar premise… well, the cross-country journey part at any rate.

Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent, the PADDINGTON movies; BROOKLYN) lives a quiet and uneventful life of retirement in Devon along with Maureen (Penelope Wilton, the DOWNTON ABBEY TV series and movies), his wife of many years. One day, he receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy (Linda Bassett, CALENDAR GIRLS), a former colleague at the distillery where he used to work. She writes that she’s now in a cancer hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed, telling him that her doctors have informed her that there’s nothing more they can do for her. Harold writes her a perfunctory letter of sympathy and heads out to the mailbox to post it but decides instead to drop it off at the post office in town. Stopping first at a gas station minimart to pick up a few snacks, he strikes up a conversation with the young woman at the cash register who tells him that when her own relative was dying of cancer, she told the woman that she wasn’t going to die yet. Miraculously, the young woman said, the relative continued to live. The story moves Harold and he decides to tell Queenie that she can’t die until he walks there to see her — a journey of some 500 miles, from the southwest corner of the country up to its northeast, not far from Scotland. Off Harold goes, leaving Maureen wondering where her husband has gone. On his pilgrimage to Berwick, Harold meets various people who are inspired by his story, transforming him into an unwitting media darling.

In the midst of all the craziness that’s going on in the world right now, there’s something to be said about simple stories like THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY that give audiences a few hours of respite. In that regard, HAROLD FRY is definitely a winner but its gentle pacing is admittedly going to appeal more to seniors than it will to millennials. Based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Rachel Joyce, director Hettie MacDonald (BEAUTIFUL THING) sticks the story on a slow simmer that only barely gets hot when Harold’s trek starts attracting a following. Unfortunately, as is often the case in movie adaptations of books, HAROLD FRY cuts out a good chunk of backstory, which is probably the more interesting part, relegating it instead to brief flashbacks of key moments in Harold and Maureen’s long marriage. When Harold is joined on his trek by Wilf (Daniel Frogson), a troubled, young man who reminds Harold of his own son, the story starts to cook but then fizzles out far too quickly to justify Harold’s moment of self-assessment and the frank conversation that he and Maureen have been avoiding for years.

Both Broadbent and Wilton are consummate actors who elevate any project they’re involved in, so they were good casting choices here. If only HAROLD FRY were a BBC travel series about one man’s hike across the length of England, then it would be fine but that’s not what this movie is about. (I have to say, though, that it is rather impressive that Harold can walk for 87 days and only get rained on twice. I was in London last July for ten days and it rained for nine of them.) Nevertheless, HAROLD FRY is certain to find an appreciative audience amongst Anglophiles of a certain age.

THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY opens in Hong Kong on Thursday, November 30th.

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