Taglines: Love can grow where you least expect it.
An American widowed woman left in debt by her unfaithfull husband finds a man living on the land of Hampstead. He lives in a broken down shack but happy with his life. One day she spots him being beaten up so calls the police and goes to see him, so after this she starts to fall for him and helps him from being evicted.
More proof that Richard Curtis’s style of comedy-drama is very difficult to imitate. This placid, silver-years heartwarmer, set in a picturesque and pricey part of the capital – in this case, Hampstead – is pretty obviously inspired by Curtis’s 1999 hit Notting Hill, though actually taken from the true-life case of Harry Hallowes, a reclusive man who in 2007 claimed squatter’s rights to a patch of ground in Hampstead Heath in London where he’d set up camp and legally saw off some property developers who’d tried to oust him.
This movie casts Brendan Gleeson as Harry – renamed Donald – and invents a quirky American widow called Emily, played by Diane Keaton, who falls in love with him. This movie has some decent moments, and its scepticism about property moguls is something that will chime with many right now.
The cast all do an honest job: Phil Davis has a punchy cameo and Jason Watkins plays a creepy accountant with romantic designs on Emily. It is genuinely funny when he reveals his toe-curling hobby: he is the leader of a ukulele orchestra who perform at Emily’s birthday party. But there is something so treacly and fundamentally unconvincing about the relationship itself and the ending is weirdly fudged, quite divorced from the real-life case of Hallowes.
Hampstead is a 2017 British drama film directed by Joel Hopkins and written by Robert Festinger. It is based on the life of Harry Hallowes who successfully claimed ownership of a half-acre plot of Hampstead Heath[4]. The film stars Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson, James Norton, Lesley Manville, Jason Watkins, Hugh Skinner, and Simon Callow. The film was released on 23 June 2017, by Entertainment One Films.
Hampstead (2019)
Directed by: Joel Hopkins
Starring: Diane Keaton, James Norton, Brendan Gleeson, Hugh Skinner, Adeel Akhtar, Lesley Manville, Alistair Petrie, Phil Davis, Deborah Findlay, Rosalind Ayres, Elizabeth Conboy
Screenplay by: Robert Festinger
Production Design by: Sarah Kane
Cinematography by: Felix Wiedemann
Film Editing by: Robin Sales
Costume Design by: Liza Bracey
Set Decoration by: Clare Andrade
Art Direction by: James Wakefield
Music by: Stephen Warbeck
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive material and language.
Distributed by: IFC Films
Release Date: June 14, 2019
Visits: 42
