Man Booker Prize winning
British author Julian Barnes’ 2011 novel The
Sense of An Ending makes it’s clandestine big screen debut in this quiet
and talky English-language film debut from Indian director Ritesh Batra. The story of retired divorcee Tony Webster
(Jim Broadbent) who finds his decades old past is catching up with him after
receiving a letter which triggers nostalgia over a love triangle that split
apart his best friendship, it’s an ensemble low key drama about the ways we can
reshape our memories of the past over extended periods of time and how our
actions can have lifelong consequences on our friends and loved ones. Think of Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt with a mere fraction of
that film’s comic timing and dramatic power.
Well-meaning with noble
intentions, unfortunately the story itself is fairly light and average Hallmark
Television poetic fluff aimed mostly at senior viewers and the film is populated
by overqualified actors including but not limited to Charlotte Rampling,
Michelle Dockery and Matthew Goode (fresh off of Downton Abbey) who can’t seem to tell if they’re starring
in a Stephen Daldry film. Not since The Hours has a literary adaptation been so in love with it's own lyrical pontificating about the meaning of life and so on. Thankfully however, Ritesh Batra keeps the proceedings just on this side of the tracks and prevents things from veering too far into lofty art-house pretension.
It goes
without saying performances from the gifted cast are solid with emphasis on
subtlety and nuance. My personal
favorite exchanges come not from Rampling and Broadbent but flashbacks to
Broadbent’s youth where Rampling’s mother played by Emily Mortimer exudes
unspoken longings for him, implied without being declared outright. Broadbent gives Tony Webster quiet unrest with much of his emotional turmoil expressed facially rather than spoken. Charlotte Rampling, the last of a dying breed of great actresses ala Isabelle Huppert, is splendid and the real reason to seek out The Sense of An Ending, providing a brilliantly subtle performance which conveys a wide range of emotion with only the slightest smile and blink of an eye.
Technically speaking The Sense of an Ending is solid with
ornate widescreen cinematography by Christopher Ross, careful attention paid to
detail by production designer Jacqueline Abrahams and an ethereal score by Testament of Youth composer Max
Richter. Still, for all the pitch perfect
ingredients and performances I still felt underwhelmed in the end and also feel
each of the actors have given better performances elsewhere. Fans of the small town drama concerning
middle aged characters reliving their youth will come away satisfied if not a
little disengaged. For myself, it tends
to meander if not drag it’s feet at times. There have and will be again great films about midlife crises stemming from our versions of the past, but this one is a bit too content to lay there without making any genuinely new emotional discoveries.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki