The movie Hope Gap recently appeared in my Amazon Prime Video recommendations, with the synopsis being that Edward (Bill Nighy) suddenly announces that he is divorcing Grace (Annette Bening) after almost thirty years. Being a child of divorce, I was quite intrigued to see how the movie approached the matter, so I broke my habit of never paying extra for movies on Amazon to find out.

Ed. Note: spoilers ahead, as the movie’s plot is discussed in detail

The movie has some aspects I appreciated very much. The acting is superb, and the presentation is almost more like a play, in that its simplicity allows the complexity of the family’s relationships to shine through, giving us a glimpse into the intense emotional fallout of divorce. Moreover, while Grace finds some hope toward the end, Hope Gap makes it clear that divorce is painful for both parties. This counterpoint to the idea that divorce can be unqualifiedly good was quite welcome.

That said, Hope Gap was incredibly hard for me to watch because of the lack of communication between Grace and Edward, and because of the divorce’s ramifications for their son Jamie (Josh O’Connor). On more than one occasion, I found myself wanting to yell at the parents, “Can’t you see beyond the end of your own noses?! You’re digging your own hole!!”

As the movie begins, we see a couple who have been married for almost thirty years. They know each other’s routines and habits, and it seems they should be very comfortable with each other. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Edward and Grace talk at each other rather than with each other, as if they merely exist in the same house, drawn inward into their own mental and emotional worlds. Grace has a forceful personality and freely expresses her ideas, saying she wants people to engage with them. In reality, she wants agreement, not engagement. When others think differently, Grace lashes out. Edward is conversely passive and avoidant—almost willfully stifled. Grace says she wants Edward to talk about himself, but whenever he does, she mocks his opinion, says it is not good enough, or otherwise shoots it down, so he aloofly refrains from saying what he feels or wants.

There is so much I could say about how Grace and Edward interact with each other, because it was so maddening to watch them fail to choose to listen and communicate. My focus, however, will be Jamie, because his relationship with his parents and his experience with their divorce struck me most deeply, as an adult child of divorce myself.

The night before Edward makes his announcement of divorcing his wife, Jamie comes for a visit. We later learn that this was at the request of his father, who wanted Jamie around to soften the blow to Grace. While Jamie is there, his parents fight, and Edward walks off. In her anger, Grace upends the kitchen table and everything on it. The resulting crash brings Jamie from his room to find out what happened, and Grace reveals her feelings about her marriage while her son cleans up her mess. The next morning, Edward discloses to Jamie over breakfast that he is leaving Grace for another woman that very afternoon. He discusses his feelings with Jamie and asks him to stay longer than planned so Jamie can console Grace after he has walked out.

As an adult child of divorce, I immediately sensed that these two incidents were nothing new, but rather part of a longstanding pattern. Jamie had likely grown up being emotionally dumped on by both parents, who refused to share their true emotions with each other. He tries to stay out of their way but often ends up managing the aftermath. For example, though Grace claims she would have cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, she did not bother to lift a finger to help Jamie clean up while she unloaded on him and even insulted him. Likewise, avoidant Edward plans to escape and leave the emotional damage for Jamie to manage. Edward might look like a victim at first glance, but he is running away for something easy so he can remain passive instead of challenging himself or putting in hard relationship work. He tells Jamie that Angela has no demands or expectations of him, just love. But since when, I ask, does real love preclude making demands of someone? Can real love not expect something of the other? Hardly! Clearly lacking either the ability or the will to speak directly to each other, Edward and Grace wedge their son between them, seeking his emotional support, asking his opinion of their relationship, and insisting he deliver messages and bad news from one to the other.

In short, Jamie gets used by both parents, but has trouble seeing it. When a friend later asks Jamie how things are with his girlfriend, we see that his own romantic relationship has suffered because he has spent every weekend visiting his mother. His parents’ mess takes an unfair toll on his own life. At first, Jamie does not protest or stand up for himself, and while he later does argue with his mother some, he does so ineffectually.

There may be a few reasons for this. At times, his mother seems to be a narcissist. She gaslights people, invalidates the desires and emotions of her husband and son alike, and guilt-trips both of them. Jamie’s father might come across as a meek victim, but in reality, he is passive-aggressive and mostly cold, and his solution to his problems is to run from what is difficult. Behavior does not exist in a vacuum, so Jamie had likely already grown up surrounded by such tendencies. His parents should have modeled for him how to set boundaries and helped him know and understand his own feelings, but they apparently failed to do so. How could this young man, who never had examples of healthy behavior, possibly process his own emotions while his parents dump on him and manipulate him? That he is unaware of his own feelings is elucidated by his friend. He says to her, “I’m not the one who’s been left,” but she counters, “Aren’t you?” Later, his friend asks, “How will you feel?” His surprised “Me?” shows that his own emotions are a foreign concept; he has spent so much of his life managing his parents’ emotions that he knows not his own.

Over the course of the movie, I became increasingly frustrated with how Jamie’s parents treated him, but what really infuriated me was that it concluded with Jamie seemingly happy because his mother had found some hope. This may seem like a nice happy ending, but it suggests that a son’s happiness depends on his parents’ happiness. I wanted to see Jamie instead look at his own emotions, express his anger and pain, and pursue a healthier relationship with his parents. Instead, the sort-of “happy” ending served up continued emotional enmeshment, where the boundaries between son and parents remained muddy, where Jamie was still too wrapped up in his parents’ happiness. This perpetuates the false idea that the children of divorce are okay if their parents are, period. Hope Gap had a golden opportunity to challenge that idea, to highlight the wounds dealt to children of divorce independent of their parents’ emotional state. In the end, however, the movie focused on the parents’ emotional experience, which is precisely the problem: In so many divorces, the parents’ emotional experiences and needs mask or even smother those of the children, and society largely contends that the kids will be fine. This could be no further from the truth!

While the marriage of my father and mother was very different than that of Jamie’s parents, my father and stepmother’s marriage is strikingly similar, hence my strong reactions to Hope Gap. My stepmother is controlling and perhaps a bit narcissistic, wanting everyone to agree with her and often baiting others into painful, drawn-out arguments when they do not, while my passive father shies away from discussing how he really feels. Like Grace and Edward, they talk at each other instead of to each other. So I recognize from experience the unhealthiness of this behavior pattern and how it might have felt for Jamie to be stuck in the middle between them. I wanted so much for the movie to address this more. In fact, I would say from experience that Jamie may have grown up experiencing childhood emotional neglect (CEN), a situation in which parents do not respond sufficiently to their children’s emotional needs.

It seems to me that it may be common for those of us whose parents divorced when we were young to have experienced childhood emotional neglect. After all, many divorces may stem from a lack of emotional skills or from being too involved in one’s own needs to see and respond to those of the other. It may be, then, that many of us grew up like Jamie, pulled between parents, emotionally forgotten or dumped on, and not knowing how we felt. (This is a topic I would like to explore in more depth, so stay tuned for a post from me about CEN and children of divorce.)

About the author:

Cafea Fruor (author’s pseudonym) is a woman whose parents divorced when she was 10. The wounds from the divorce changed her from a happy, sweet girl into a snarky, sarcastic, defensive, hurting, emotionally reserved curmudgeon. Having learned to be vulnerable through years of therapy, she has softened into the much more loving, joyful, happy woman she was made to be.

Reflection Questions for Small Groups or Individuals

1. Have you seen Hope Gap? If so, what are your thoughts on the movie based on your experience? If not, what do you think based on Cafea’s depiction of the film?

2. Do you relate to Jamie?

3. What are your thoughts, generally, about how divorce is portrayed in film?