In The Home The Bookshop

Bill Nighy shines as Brundish

The Hollywood Reporter

★★★★ Evokes the sensation of losing yourself in a good book. Emily Mortimer is simply perfect

One Room With A View

Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name; The Bookshop is set in 1959, Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a free-spirited widow, puts grief behind her and risks everything to open up a bookshop – the first such shop in the sleepy seaside town of Hardborough, England. Fighting damp, cold and considerable local apathy she struggles to establish herself but soon her fortunes change for the better.

By exposing the narrow-minded local townsfolk to the best literature of the day including Nabokov’s scandalising Lolita and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, she opens their eyes thereby causing a cultural awakening in a town which has not changed for centuries.

 Her activities bring her a kindred spirit and ally in the figure of Mr. Brundish (Bill Nighy) who is himself sick of the town’s stale atmosphere. But this mini social revolution soon brings her fierce enemies: she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers and also crosses Mrs. Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), Hardborough’s vengeful, embittered alpha female who is herself a wannabe doyenne of the local arts scene.

 When Florence refuses to bend to Gamart’s will, they begin a struggle not just for the bookshop but for the very heart and soul of the town.

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Filmmakers
Director: Isabel Coixet
Writer: Isabel Coixet
Cast
Emily Mortimer
Patricia Clarkson
Bill Nighy
Run Time
113 Minutes
Rating
PG
Genre
Drama