Film based on novella misses essential narrative

“Was this their exact exchange?” wonders Tony Webster, the hero and narrator of Julian Barnes’ novella The Sense of an Ending, after describing one of the pivotal conversations of his adolescence. “Almost certainly not,” he concludes. “Still, it is my best memory of the exchange.”

This slipperiness, the tenuous character of these reflections, is, you might say, the defining feature of the book: Tony dictates the terms of his story, and every recollection arrives qualified by distance and time. Doubt looms over the tale, and mistrust is the prevailing register: “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then,” Tony says by way of apologia. “Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.” The reader isn’t meant to accept this memory as truth.

I mention this fact because Ritesh Batra’s adaptation of the novella entirely neglects to make it clear. To judge by the film — an inoffensive little trifle, reasonably faithful to the architecture of the Barnes story if not to its elusive spirit — one would have hardly any reason to doubt the particulars of the Tony Webster saga as it’s related here at all. This is partly a structural problem.

The novella’s conceit is simple: Barnes divides the book in two along an historical line: the first half recounts Tony’s ill-fated teenage relationship with a girl named Veronica and friendship with a schoolmate called Adrian Finn; the second half details how their destinies come to intersect tragically in the present day. The film shuffles the deck: Tony’s past is introduced piecemeal, with flashbacks flitting about the present action. This has the effect of transforming a complex moral drama into a routine thriller — a mystery that withholds without purpose a wide range of revelations and facts.

But because film is by nature a more literal medium than literature, and because the novella’s first-person account has by necessity graded into cinematic omniscience, Batra’s adaptation forfeits the ambiguity that for Barnes was precisely the point. The flashbacks read not as glimpses of an unreliable mind but as objective, definitive truths. What Tony learns along the way doesn’t refute or contradict what he remembers so much as supplement it. Tony, moreover, is rendered by Batra (and screenwriter Nick Payne), as a curmudgeonly but well-meaning and repentant old fool with a past he’s put behind him — a stark contrast to the clueless, callous malefactor described by the source material, who emerges on the other side of this adventure without the faintest trace of redemption. In the book he’s unforgivable. In the film he learns not to be.

As played by Jim Broadbent, and in the hands of the resolutely sentimental Batra, Tony’s mild crankiness is a temporary condition, handily resolved. And so our hero follows a hackneyed Hollywood arc from eccentric misfit to winning paragon: the movie allows him absolution, in fact downplays his sins considerably, and for Tony, all is redeemed.

Scarcely has a character been so unproductively misinterpreted. And rarely has a famous novel been so grossly betrayed.