The Sense of an Ending

seen on 23 April 2017

Jim Broadbent s Tony Webster, Harriet Walter as his divorced wife Margaret and Charlotte Rampling as Veronica (once his girlfriend) star Nick Payne's adaptation of Julian Barnes's 2011 novel, directed by Ritesh Batra. Billy Howle plays the young Tony, Freya Mavor the young Veronica, Emily Mortimer her mother Sarah, and Michelle Dockery plays Tony and Margaret's daughter Susie.

I've not read the book, but a glance at it shows that some changes have (inevitably) been made. However, regarding it simply as a film, it is not perfectly realised, and the sense of an ending is not really achieved at all. The crux of the matter is the revelation of an episode from Tony Webster's past as filtered through his current recollections. This is triggered by the news that he has been left a diary and some money by the mother of an ex-girlfriend, and by the further fact that Veronica, who is administering her mother's estate, is withholding the diary.

As he begins to explain the story to his ex-wife (hoping for her legal advice as she is a Q.C.) we begin to see the episode in flashback. As more revelations are made in the present - chiefly through Tony's determination to meet with Veronica, and the aftermath of their encounter - the flashbacks continue but also show us that Tony's memory has been inaccurate or else deliberately evasive. This is hardly surprising as his actions in the past were hardly kindly when one of his closest friends became involved with Veronica.

However, the flashback technique is in this case rather jarring, and of course some aspects of what happened are not directly accessible to Tony's memory (honest or otherwise) and so we do not see them, no matter how crucial they may be to our understanding, while others which we may well have expected to see, such as Veronica's gift to Tony of a camera, are referred to but not shown. The result is that the flashbacks look clumsy and serve to interrupt the development of the characters in the present time. Tony is presented as grumpy and unaware of his tendency to repress his emotions and to oppress his family; the softening at the end looks rather sentimental as he confides to his daughter just as she is about to go into labour, and then appears to become a model grandfather. Jim Broadbent handles all this competently, but the film does not make it easy to engage with him. Harriet Walter as his ex-wife gives a convincing portrait of an intelligent and forbearing woman exasperated by the obtuseness of men.

Veronica in flashback is something of an enigma to the young Tony, and of course remains so in the hands of Charlotte Ramping as the older woman. She clearly (and reasonably) has almost no residual affection for Tony and regards his re-appearance in her life as most unwelcome; her freezing responses leave him discouraged and embarrassed, but not exactly chastened, nd thre is n uncomfortable sense that he is stalking her, not entirely dispelled by the fact that both his wife and his daughter point this out to him.

The overall effect is too muted, and the film perhaps betrays too strongly the fact that it is a literary adaptation - the narrative structure which might work well on the page is not translated properly into cinematic terms.