Rather thin material stretched out to fill a whole movie.
Nice music, nice photography, but whether someone chooses to run on the Sabbath or not isn't enough material to make a film of this length.
Like many of the "blast from the past" movies from the 1980s and 1990s, such as A Room with a View (1985), A Passage to India (1984) or The Remains of the Day (1993), the movie is a boring story where most of the effort has gone into historical recreations and "meaningful moments" like the ridiculous scene in this film where the man gets upset about running on the Sabbath, to fool award-giving bodies like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences into thinking it is a classy effort, rather than into entertaining or interesting viewers.
Apparently, at the time, winning awards like Oscars ensured a certain amount of box office success, so I assume that making these boring period-piece movies to win awards was a deliberate strategy.
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