"The Bookshop": Director/writer Isabel Coixet's ("Learning to Drive") adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald's 1978 novel has the feel of a book collecting dust on the back shelf of a closet. There's an expectation of great potential considering the lineage, but on closer examination, the experience teeters on tedium so much it ends up a mystery of what the draw was in the first place.
A widow (Emily Mortimer) takes a major emotional and financial leap in 1959 to open a bookshop in the conservative coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk. She opens her store as a loving tribute to her dead husband. But it is met with resistance.
This unfolds in a production that is melancholy in mood, arthritic in movement and emotionally stagnant.
