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Us review – divorce drama offers warmth and wanderlust

You may not think an adaptation of the 2014 David Nicholls novel about a fading marriage would offer much in the way of escapism, but everything about Us (BBC One) is so Before All of This that, at times, it is hard to resist its blatant cosiness. In the middle of the night, Connie (Saskia Reeves) wakes up her husband, Douglas, (Tom Hollander, never more at home than when playing a man on the edge) and tells him she is thinking about leaving him. Douglas, a man who wears routine like a coat of armour, is shocked and then quietly devastated. Their mopey teenage son Albie is about to leave home. “I want … change,” Connie says, not unreasonably.

It’s all very polite and friendly. They still like each other, but Connie is bored. It’s not so much Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a tussle over the Boden catalogue. In fact, the main conflict arises from the fact that the family has a “grand tour” of Europe booked – “three weeks, six countries, 12 cities. We’re like, I don’t know, U2,” says Douglas, never not ruining the fun through his extreme enthusiasm – and their insurance doesn’t cover marital strife. So they go on holiday together anyway, as one last hurrah, to see what more they can all learn about each other and themselves.

We flick between two timelines: the present-day tour, with Albie in tow, and 24 years earlier, when Douglas and Connie first got together. Then, they were set up by Douglas’s sister at a dinner party full of unbearable young people, including a trapeze artist who didn’t believe in science. Portishead is on the stereo and the streets are paved with Wonderbra billboards. Young Douglas is square; young Connie is cool. He’s a scientist; she’s an artist. He draws the line at an antacid tablet as her pupils dilate from more illicit pharmaceuticals. Yet in the fog of incompatibility, they fancy each other, and like each other. He’s the nice guy she has been looking for. She is the wild card he needs. It is not particularly groundbreaking, but it is all done very tastefully.

In the present day, the last-ditch trip kicks off in Paris. Albie is practically mute around his father, permanently attached to his camera with one hand and his phone with the other. “I’ve basically come backpacking with my parents,” he grumbles, as he embarks on an all-expenses-paid holiday around Europe, which made me wonder for a moment if they should try divorcing him, instead of each other.

Whether you have been on holiday this summer or not, it is slightly painful to watch simple travel play out so freely, not a suspicious cough or a mask or a well-thumbed bottle of hand sanitiser in sight. When Albie picks up a girl called Cat, she greets Connie with a kiss on the hand, and it is one of countless reminders of a different time. Should they see the Mona Lisa? Should they skip it, for the sake of spontaneity? I was practically shouting at the screen that they should take their chance while they can because it won’t always be so easy. Then I thought about blue passports again.

Perhaps this is why I found that Us worked best as a study of a middle-aged man who has the rug of familiarity pulled out from underneath him. I found it oddly relatable. Hollander is superb as a man baffled by the need for change. His family want to eat adventurous meals, while he would like to stick with steak. He sees great works of art and can’t help but say that they’d be “a nightmare to frame”. He is everydad, just trying to get by. For all the joviality, though, it makes serious points about the damage that an inability to communicate can cause; the scenes with Albie, in particular, in which Douglas is trying to do better, but just can’t, are particularly touching.

Occasionally the middle-class, massive-kitchen-ness of Us can teeter just on the edge of smug, but in the end I was charmed, and as strange as it is to feel nostalgic for such a recent period of time, that nostalgia was felt keenly. The cast are all great, but particularly Hollander and Reeves, who warm up characters that could be cold, and it is easy to root for them to find, well, something. Is it their marriage, or is it freedom? It is as hard to tell as Us is easy to like.