Broadbent lifts film, but it falls short of novel
MOVIE REVIEW
“I’m a great believer in time’s revenge.”
The words are spoken late in “The Sense of an Ending,” although it might be just as accurate to say that they are spoken early.
In the grand, somewhat-dubious tradition of movies in which the wounds of the past bleed heavily into the present, this genteel British puzzlebox of a movie leaps deftly back and forth in time, bridging the gap between an old man’s present-day existence and his lively 1960s school days.
The older version of Tony Webster (an excellent Jim Broadbent) has lived a mostly quiet, ordinary life. He spends most of his days at his small vintage-camera shop; otherwise, he’s testing the patience of his loyal ex-wife, Margaret (Harriet Walter), and their tough-minded daughter, Susie (Michelle Dockery), who is about to give birth to her first child.
One day, though, Tony receives word of the death of an older acquaintance, Sarah Ford, who has unexpectedly bequeathed to Directed by Ritesh Batra.
PG-13 (for thematic elements, a violent image, sexuality and brief strong language) 1:48 at the Drexel Theatre
him a relic from the past — one that Veronica Ford, Sarah’s daughter and Tony’s former girlfriend, refuses to surrender.
The legal and emotional complications that ensue trigger a sudden flood of painful, overwhelming memories, implicating Tony anew in a tragedy with which he has never come to terms. (The younger version of Tony is played with fresh-faced, gingerheaded appeal by Billy Howle.)
The notion of time’s revenge is thus easy enough to decipher, even as it carries with it a secondary interpretation that the filmmakers probably didn’t intend. No artistic medium can manipulate time more quickly or adroitly than cinema, but that ease of movement, if not properly earned or motivated, can quickly turn cheap and facile — a triumph of match cuts over meaning.
Despite its polished construction and immaculate pedigree, “The Sense of an Ending” doesn’t ultimately mean as much as it thinks it does.
The film, directed by Ritesh Batra (“The Lunchbox”) from a screenplay by Nick Payne, offers a skillful and elegant dilution of the Julian Barnes novel, which had the patience and tonal assurance to tell its two-part story from start to finish.
Batra and Payne, in the interests of delivering a film that’s visually varied and rhythmically interesting, have little recourse but to play chronological hopscotch, a strategy that winds up calling undue attention to its own cleverness: Every dramatic payoff is applauded, every thematic echo vigorously underlined.
One can’t entirely begrudge “The Sense of an Ending” its selfsatisfaction, though. Like the secondhand Leica cameras Tony sells in his shop, the film is a charming and meticulous piece of engineering. The evocation of Tony’s youth, a period of amusing academic mischief and (up to a point) carefree romantic ardor, is transporting enough, even if it falls short of the novel’s intellectual playfulness and intensity of feeling.
The dialogue purrs along elegantly, spoken by some of the finest British actors working today.
A satisfying match of actor and role is achieved by Charlotte Rampling, bringing her usual steely selfpossession to bear on Veronica, who makes a startling return to Tony’s life after decades of silence. She is played in flashback by the suitably bewitching Freya Mevor, while Joe Alwyn (the underrated young star of “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”) makes a superb impression as Adrian Finn, a brooding, philosophizing student who turned Tony and Veronica’s relationship into a triangle.
The movie, though, is ultimately Broadbent’s showcase — a dramatic burden he shoulders with sly, curmudgeonly expertise. Even before Tony’s dark secret comes tumbling out, the character seems like a lousy fellow: monstrously selfabsorbed; indifferent to the feelings of others; and prone to fits of impulsive, irrational behavior.
Apart from its overly mechanical plotting, the lingering frustration of “The Sense of an Ending” is that the film ultimately seems content to coddle and indulge Tony more than challenge him.
His guilt and anguish are resolved in a sudden welter of reassuring music and equally reassuring voice-over. Viewers sense the ending coming a long way off, but catharsis remains out of reach.