DULL AND SNORING!
It’s achingly stylish, but even the very best of British acting can’t stop you wishing this dreary snooze-fest would end
The novel on which this film is based won the prestigious Man Booker prize in 2011. It was written, very stylishly, by Julian Barnes. But heavens, it was dreary. It’s not a long book, but once I picked it up, I couldn’t stop putting it down.
The cinematic version is acted, also very stylishly, by a top-notch British cast including Jim Broadbent, harriet Walter, Michelle Dockery, emily Mortimer and, the star turn, gliding into the action late, like an imperious, veteran bird of prey finally ready to disperse all lesser beings, Charlotte Rampling.
Did I say action? I meant inaction. Unfortunately, like the book, Ritesh Batra’s film, adapted for the screen by Nick Payne, cannot overcome what fundamentally it is: a monotonous trudge through the unfulfilled life of a self-absorbed, mildly unpleasant, rather drippy elderly man.
This is Tony Webster (Broadbent), whose back story features love triangles and student suicide, but still somehow manages to seem utterly colourless. After less than ten minutes, the chap next to me in the cinema emitted what I mistook for a frustrated hurrumph, but turned out to be the opening salvo in a heroic symphony of snoring that lasted until the final credits, when people noisily shuffling towards the exit gave him his own personal sense of an ending.
It would be unfair to say that he didn’t miss anything. There’s an acting masterclass going on, for one thing, although I suspect that the world depicted here, of achingly middle-class, North London liberals high on green tea and self- satisfaction, is one the cast already know pretty intimately.
As Tony, Broadbent delivers one of those pitchperfect melancholic performances of his, as a divorced curmudgeon with little going on in his life except the forthcoming birth of a grandchild.
Yet even that doesn’t seem to excite him any more than the vintage cameras he sells in his tiny shop, at least not until he accompanies his daughter, Susie ( Dockery), to a National Childbirth Trust antenatal class, because her barrister mother, Tony’s ex-wife Margaret (Walter), is unavailable.
‘I should probably warn you that tonight will probably feature lesbians,’ Susie tells her father beforehand. And she herself is having her baby by artificial insemination. In some ways, this film could practically be a documentary about Islington’s Guardian-reading, almond crois santscented bourgeoisie.
Tony has an edgily cordial relationship with Margaret (enabling some fizzing chemistry between Walter and Broadbent, who keep frowning at each other beautifully). But she is as exasperated by him as, not half an hour into the film, we all are.
Sheis especially miffed to learn that there is a whole slice of his past that he has never revealed to her. This becomes relevant when he receives a solicitor’s letter telling him that a woman he last saw decades earlier has left him a diary in her will.
That woman is Sarah Ford, played in flashback, with gorgeous flightiness, by Mortimer.
She was the sexy mother of Veronica, Tony’s girlfriend (depicted as a young woman by Freya Mavor, and later by Rampling) at Bristol University back in the Sixties. But the diary wasn’t hers. It belonged to Tony’s charismatic schoolfriend Adrian Finn (Joe Alwyn), who came to a tragic end after he, like Tony (whose younger self is played by Billy howle), fell under the dangerously seductive spell of the Ford family.
For Tony, the spell was cast during a weekend in the country with the Fords, all of whom seemed much more worldly than him.
Perhaps it is that episode which gives this film distinct echoes of Joseph Losey’s 1971 adaptation of LP hartley’s celebrated novel The Go-Between, and indeed of the 2015 TV remake, in which the old codger looking back on distressing long-ago events was played by none other than the pained nostalgia specialist ... Jim Broadbent.
But just as Barnes’s source novel is not nearly
as compelling as Hartley’s book, nor do the film versions match up.
As The Sense Of An Ending labours back and forth between the Sixties and the present day, we slowly come to understand why Tony might be troubled by reawakened memories. But it is maddeningly heavy going.
FrOm a ponderous trudge to a frenzied joyride, Fast & Furious 8 is just about everything The Sense Of An Ending is not. It is also an action movie as preposterously plotted as any you will ever see, and the silliness starts with its identifying digit. Can youyo believe they’ve churned out eighteig of these films, each faster andan more furious than the one before?be It is as if everyone involvedinv is increasingly addled by risingris kerosene fumes.
ButB — and it is a big, turbochargedch but — it has a surprisinglysu intoxicating sense of fun.fu Even Helen mirren pops up, doingd some uproarious hamming asa a souped-up, even Cocknier versionv of Peggy mitchell from Eastenders. ‘I’ll give you til I’ve finished my cuppa … and I’m f****** thirsty,’ she snarls.
Alas, the great dame has only a cameoca role. The stench of boyswith-toys testosteronetesto is tempered mainly by a female super-villain, played with wild-eyed relish by a dreadlocked Charlize Theron. Her name is Cipher, and she is a cyber-terrorist determined to steal nuclear weapons in a bid to make the entire planet dance to her demented tune.
Lining up to stop her are the usual posse of craggy musclemen, again assembled by Kurt russell’s wise- cracking covert forces chief, and played by Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham. Anyone suffering from male-pattern baldness should not miss this film (by Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gray). It proclaims that not only do you need biceps as big as medicine balls to save the world, but also a head as smooth as a bowling ball.
However, for most of the insanely over-thetop action — which includes some spectacular stunts and what is surely the biggest pile-up in movie history as Cipher, hacking into the computer systems of hundreds of cars, fiendishly turns New York into her own private Scalextric set — Diesel’s Dominic Toretto is on the side of the baddies.
Why has he gone rogue? Because Cipher is holding a gun to the head of the baby son he didn’t even know about, a son he sweetly names Brian in tribute to his former compadre (the late Paul Walker).
So, if Cipher’s dastardly scheme is to be thwarted, that leaves Hobbs (Johnson) and Shaw (Statham) to overcome their mutual animosity, not to mention lines such as ‘I will beat your ass like a Cherokee drum’.
It’s very hard to pick the silliest slice of dialogue, or the most ludicrous moment from a film defiantly made up of dozens of them, but Hobbs stopping a nuclear missile with his bare hands takes some beating.
So, notwithstanding the flourish of girl power, be prepared for alpha-male showboating on a grand scale, and none of it happens quietly. I can’t guarantee that you’ll love Fast & Furious 8, but you definitely won’t fall asleep.