The dramatic portrait of a crumbling marriage or relationship often lends itself to intense performance, allowing actors to spar with one another while playing out heightened, if not uncommon, circumstances. Usually this involves harsh words, yelling, crying, thrown objects.

This is true of Edward (Bill Nighy) and Grace (Annette Bening), the central couple in the writer and director William Nicholson’s intimate, sometimes engaging “Hope Gap.” As the film begins, they are clearly in a Tennessee Williams-style, late-in-life rut: Edward is checked out, ambling through the motions of their day-to-day, while obsessively fact-checking Wikipedia. A restless Grace implores him to show the faintest interest in rekindling their connection and turns to aggressive tactics to get his attention. (Turning over the dinner table, for instance.)