The Bookshop (Isabel Coixet, 2017)

A widowed woman (Emily Mortimer) arrives in a small seaside town in 1959 and sets about opening a bookshop in a long-abandoned house, to the disapproval of the town's wealthiest woman, who immediately begins trying to chase out the new resident, underhandedly coercing the already suspicious, provincial locals against her. Her only real allies in defending her home and dream are a precocious young girl and a reclusive older widower, and the battle can only be a losing one as her vindictive opponent brings the brunt of the law to bear against her as well.
Mortimer is fine as the plucky lead, although, as is so often the case, Bill Nighy rather steals the show without raising a sweat as her widower friend. The execution is understated and sensitive in many scenes, but problem here, ultimately, is the Dickensianly caricaturish characterisation of the townspeople, either just plain simple, pompously officious or sneering, and an overall tendency to veer towards melodrama. Vicissitudes pile up on the beleaguered single woman until her situation starts to uncomfortably remind you of nothing so much as the sentimentalised plight of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop. Consequently, it doesn't work as a reflection of the constraints of a stifling era on independently-minded women, and surely that in part is what it was hoping to achieve.

5/10