The_Spectator_April_15_2017

BOOKS & ARTS

Cinema

Seeking closure

Deborah Ross

The Sense of an Ending
15, Nationwide

The Sense of an Ending is an adaptation of
Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker prize-
winning novel starring Jim Broadbent (we
love Jim Broadbent), Harriet Walter (we
love Harriet Walter) and Charlotte Ram-
pling (we love, love, love Charlotte Ram-
pling). With such a cast, you’d be minded
to think it can’t fail, and it doesn’t in this
respect. The performances are transfixing
throughout. But it does not satisfy emotion-
ally, as the ending of The Sense of an End-
ing makes no sense. It’s a (Non)Sense of
an Ending. Same with the book, which, on
completing, I think I threw across the room
with a: what? Is that it?
As directed by Ritesh Batra (The Lunch-
box), and as set in a London where you seem
to be able to get from Highgate to a south-
west postcode in a jiffy — I couldn’t help
noticing; sorry — the film has Broadbent
playing Tony Webster, who is divorced, runs a
small vintage-camera shop, and is melanchol-
ic, grumpy, wry. In other words, it’s a role with
‘Jim’ and ‘Broadbent’ written all over it. And
when a role has ‘Jim’ and ‘Broadbent’ written
all over it, then you want Jim Broadbent to
play it, and he manages to make Tony sympa-
thetic, and even endearing, whereas otherwise

We love, love, love her: Charlotte Rampling as Veronica in ‘The Sense of an Ending’

he almost certainly wouldn’t be. Tony lives a

dull, closed-down, emotionally detached kind

of life, which you may not quite believe, per-

haps because Broadbent makes Tony rather

too alert — those bright-blue eyes, have they

ever missed anything? — but you just have to

buy this, plus the way he’s suddenly rocked to

his core by an event that forces him to Con-

front. His. Past. This occurs when the mother

of his university girlfriend, Veronica, wills him

£500 and the diary of his school friend, Adri-

an, who dated Veronica after they went their

separate ways. Why was Tony in her will? Why

does she have Adrian’s diary? What does the

diary say? We are hyped for disclosure and

then, ideally, closure. That, rightly or wrong-

ly, is our narrative expectation. Yet we will be

sorely thwarted here.

The action is divided, somewhat prosai-

cally, between two timelines. There’s the past,

with Tony flashing back to his schooldays (he

is played by Billy Howle as a young man)

and his friendship with Adrian (Joe Alwyn)

— we are told he was brilliant, yet we see

little evidence — as well as his relationship

with Veronica (Freya Mavor), who takes him

to stay with her family for a very odd kind

of weekend filled with sexual tension, and

fried eggs gone wrong. And then there’s the

now, which has Tony explaining what hap-

pened back then, as far as he remembers, to

his ex-wife Margaret (Walter; terrific), who

is a very long suffering ex-wife. (I think if my

The ending of The Sense of an Ending

is a (Non)Sen se of an En ding

ex-husband kept trucking up to go over and

over the details of his first-ever girlfriend, I’d

mostly draw the curtains, cower behind the

sofa and pretend to be out.) The two have

a pregnant daughter (Michelle Dockery,

whom we don’t yet love, but she is young and

still has time). And Rampling, meanwhile,

plays the Veronica of today. She is awarded

the least screen time and is given rather lit-

tle to do, but Rampling does not need much

screen time or much of anything to do to be

riveting. Although quite why Veronica is so

bitter, we don’t know. And quite why she

doesn’t take some responsibility for what

occurred we also don’t know. There’s a lot

we don’t know, irritatingly.

This is about memory, how we slice and

dice our pasts to come up with a self we can

live with. Tony does make a discovery — to

do with a letter he sent all those years ago; is

that it? — although why that makes him the

one responsible... you guessed it, we don’t

know. But his new self-knowledge, such as

it is, has a powerful redemptive effect. Tony

has learned to feel again; Tony has learned

to feel for his daughter, his ex-wife, even the

postman. And we never understand why. We

don’t expect every loose end to always be

tied up — even though it would be nice —

but you do, I think, have the right to expect

some understanding of why.

That said, the performances certainly

lift this above being yet another film about

middle-aged, middle-class people pootling

around London (in a jiffy!) while fretting

about themselves. But it is entirely about the

journey, not the destination. Just so you know.