I first encountered John Irvin’s 1985 film Turtle Diary more than a decade ago, drawn by its Harold Pinter screenplay and all-star cast, including Oscar winners Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley. I came away convinced I had found an overlooked gem, but in the years that followed, this sweet film remained obscure, never even getting a DVD release. Upon revisiting it for the fortieth anniversary, and wondering if it was worth rediscovering, I realised the film is now the same age as most of its characters, all of whom, in one way or another, are conspicuously alone, being either divorced, widowed, or just single. Not only is this unusual in a film I remembered as a romantic comedy, it’s just one example of how quietly unconventional it is.
Like Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero – its better-known contemporary – Turtle Diary is an environmental film whose most potent weapon amidst the garish cinema of the ‘80s was understatedness. Based on a novel by Russell Hoban, it tells the story of two lonely Londoners: Neara (Jackson), a successful children’s author, and William (Kingsley), who works in a bookshop. They meet in London Zoo, where they hatch a plan to steal two sea turtles and release them into the wild.
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The film begins with the pair as strangers, watching the turtles swimming in claustrophobic semidarkness. In their own lives they are both stuck: Neaera is bored of writing children’s books about anthropomorphised animals whilst William lives in a bedsit following the collapse of his marriage and business career. The setup is pure romcom – the pair get a ‘meet cute’ outside the aquarium and there’s even a matchmaker in George the zookeeper (Michael Gambon) – but Neaera’s yearning for a connection beyond the romantic is foregrounded when her vigil is interrupted by two young lovers going through a breakup, one telling the other, “It’s too late.”
Marketed as a whimsical caper comedy, what appears disarmingly low-key on the surface is stealthily radical, much like its unassuming protagonists, who dissent not only in their eco-heroism but in their lifestyle choices. What emerges is a love story in which the romance is non-romantic, normalising and even celebrating singledom in ways that feel perhaps more resonant in today’s atomised dating landscape than they did at the time.
The pair’s relationship blossoms along the chaste lines of Brief Encounter, though their non-romance is platonic rather than polite. Spurred on by the illicit idea of freeing the turtles, William launches into a dalliance with his younger coworker Harriet (Harriet Walter), suggesting a midlife crisis similar to that underpinning the May/December affair in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. It is only after Neaera has an impressionistic nightmare involving a shark attack, which she claims represents William’s death, that he is willing to accept her help, along with the suggestion of a deeper, less egocentric reason for the crusade.
Much of the film’s subtlety lies in capturing the imperceptible moments when life changes, and how mundane these often are. The turtles’ triumphal return to the waves marks the climax of Neaera and William’s peculiar love story, but rather than being a happy ending it is followed by an awkward, almost post-coital uncertainty, after which they return to London and their separate lives. Only then does Neaera’s longed-for sense of connection unexpectedly manifest in the form of a liberating one-night stand with George.
Outside of the aquarium, the film is rich in memorable character cameos, including William’s DIY-loving landlady Mrs. Inchcliffe (Rosemary Leech) and Neaera’s neighbour Mr. Johnson (Richard Johnson), a ‘confirmed bachelor’ who spends his life travelling and is secretive about his work, playfully leaning into the old association between homosexuality and spying. In such ways the film presents an everyday world in which alternatives to heteronormative lifestyles are the norm, demonstrating to Neaera and William the many ways in which it is possible to be alone without being lonely. At one point, they have lunch together at the London Zoo café, which Pinter used twenty years earlier as the setting for a much creepier encounter between Anne Bancroft and James Mason in The Pumpkin Eater. If that film painted a horrifyingly toxic picture of straight suburban life, Turtle Diary shows versions of its characters who narrowly escaped from it.
In many classic London romcoms, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to Bridget Jones’ Diary, loneliness and aloneness are treated as one and the same, making Turtle Diary’s non-judgemental treatment of its characters all the more valuable in light of current conversations around loneliness and mental health. Although the portrayal of single life is mostly positive (spoilers ahead), it also includes the glamorously enigmatic Miss Neap (Eleanor Bron), William’s neighbour who commits suicide, but whose body he only discovers after returning from the ocean. Even then, far from being a stereotypical spinster (think ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ in Rear Window), she is an intensely private person whose actions are presented as her choice to remain alone, one that prompts the first open, honest conversation between William and his silently macho neighbour, Sandor (Jeroen Krabbé).
It would be easy to dismiss the film as a comedy of middle-class manners, populated by quirky, middle-aged caricatures, but by focusing on older people, it offers a nuanced reflection of how our expectations of each other can change over time. When Harriet – the only major character under forty – reacts jealously to William’s relationship with Neaera, he replies, “Everything isn’t sex.”
After its original release, Turtle Diary was forgotten, a study in loneliness so effective that it seemed content to be alone itself, enjoying a discreet afterlife of drifting around, not minding when the few who noticed it were too shallow to pay much attention. The idea of freeing the turtles occurs to William after he learns they are the same age as himself. Now that the film is that age as well, perhaps its fate should echo that of the turtles, and be liberated from obscurity so that its vision of aloneness can be enjoyed by everyone.
