The Sense of an Ending
Ritesh Batra (2017)
I read Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending when it was first published in 2011; although I didn’t much like it, I was gratified that, most unusually for me, I guessed the main plot twist before it arrived. Nearly six years on, I’d forgotten the details of that twist: all I knew when I sat down to watch Ritesh Batra’s screen adaptation of the book, with a screenplay by Nick Payne, was that there was a ‘surprise’ revelation in store. Did I dredge up a memory of what the twist was or, for a second time, see it coming a mile off? This seems an apt enough question to ask about Barnes’s meditation on aging and remembrance of things past though I’m not sure it’s one that the film-makers mean to provoke.
Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) is in his sixties. He lives in London, alone but in regular contact with his ex-wife Margaret (Harriet Walter), a lawyer, and their daughter Susie (Michelle Dockery), who’s in her mid-thirties, works in public relations and is about to become a single parent. Tony owns and runs a shop that sells vintage cameras although he doesn’t spend much screen time there and, when asked if the business is successful, replies that’s not important because he’s retired. He also says that he’s ‘happily divorced’, a self-description that’s evidently untrue. Tony is a miserable sod – a ‘curmudgeon’, according to Margaret and Susie. When a jolly postman (Nick Mohammed) calls and remarks ‘Lovely morning’, Tony mutters ‘Just about’ and shuts the door in his face. The seemingly settled routine of Tony’s life is interrupted by the arrival of a letter from the firm of solicitors handling the estate of the recently deceased Sarah Ford. She has written Tony a letter, which refers to an attachment that she thinks he should have – this bequest is both unexplained in the letter and missing from what is handed over to Tony. When he queries this, the solicitor (Karina Fernandez) tells him the attachment was the diary of someone called Adrian Finn and that this is now in the possession of the late Mrs Ford’s executor, her daughter Veronica. The letter and the interview with the solicitor turn the protagonist’s thoughts to the distant past. He and Adrian Finn were close friends at and after secondary school; Veronica Ford became Tony’s girlfriend while both were students at Bristol University; she then switched from Tony to Adrian; not long afterwards, the latter killed himself. From this point onwards, the film’s narrative moves between Tony’s present life – including his pursuit of the diary and Veronica – and flashback scenes involving his late-teenage self (Billy Howle).
Barnes’s novel is narrated throughout by the older Tony Webster, who is both an unreliable narrator and, for most of the book, an unenlightened one in relation to his own past. Tony eventually discovers – if we believe what he says at this point of the story – the full background to Adrian Finn’s suicide forty-odd years ago; the facts of the matter are at variance with the assumptions that Tony has made throughout his adult life. But he is a sustained narrative voice, through which Julian Barnes can decide what to disclose and what to withhold about his main character – and how much to insinuate his own voice into the storytelling. The Sense of an Ending is a somewhat academic piece of writing. The novel’s title is taken from a non-fiction book of the same name: The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction is a 1967 work of literary criticism by Frank Kermode, which looks at ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’. Although their decision to ration voiceover narration, and thereby Tony’s philosophical musings, is welcome, the absence of a slippery storyteller presents Ritesh Batra and Nick Payne with a problem. The sexagenarian Tony doesn’t interpose his voice between himself and us: he’s there on the screen to watch and interpret. The flashbacks to the younger Tony, as expressions of what he prefers to remember, allow Batra and Payne more scope for pulling the wool over our eyes but they don’t exploit these deceptive possibilities. Rather than showing us things that didn’t really happen, they merely delay the full disclosure of what did. Nothing wrong with that but it’s standard practice in a film whose drama depends on the mystery of crucial past events – it hardly replicates Tony Webster’s singularity as a teller of his life story.
A screen adaptation of a novel, of course, is under no obligation to try to recreate its source material. What often goes awry with such adaptations is, rather, that the film-makers depart from the original in one way without seeming to appreciate the implications of their doing so for aspects that they’re not consciously changing. This is what happens with The Sense of an Ending. Readers of the novel have to rely entirely for the information they’re getting on Tony Webster, at the same time as realising they can’t trust what he’s saying. The viewer of the film doesn’t have to contend with comparable narrative subterfuge, and therefore tends to ask questions which the reader may have been diverted from asking. What has made Tony so irascible and pedantic? Was he like this throughout his marriage; and, if so, how did the evidently caring but no-nonsense Margaret put up with him for as long as she did? Is Tony stuck in the past because of the turbulent events of forty years ago and the feelings of self-pity or self-recrimination these left him with? There are hints that this is the case. In the significance of the vintage camera shop (it was Veronica who bought Tony his first Leica), although it’s not clear if he’s spent his whole working life there. In his announcement, late in the story, that his watch has stopped (by now, Tony has reached a point from which he can psychologically Move Forward: Margaret buys him a new watch). Or is Tony grumpy because he didn’t become the poet he once told Veronica’s family he wanted to be? Once he’s been rattled by Sarah Ford’s unexpected legacy, Tony is forever telling his ex-wife about what revisiting the past is making him do and feel. Hardly surprising that Margaret finds this baffling: according to her, Tony had never until now even mentioned Veronica, Sarah or Adrian to her. What explains his sudden shift from reticence to relentless confession, especially if what’s bugging him now has bugged him for getting on half a century?
Billy Howle, who was good in the BBC dramatisation of The Witness for the Prosecution last Christmas. is even better here as the young Tony but the actor’s charm and the sympathy you feel for his character have the effect of reinforcing the puzzle of what caused the older Tony to curdle – and of why becoming a husband and father seemed to make no difference. Although it’s not easy to believe that Howle’s face could become Jim Broadbent’s, there is something in both actors’ blue eyes – a capacity to be surprised that their owner considers a weakness and which is quickly concealed – that makes for some kind of continuity between the two ages of Tony. You root for the younger man, particularly on the weekend he spends with his girlfriend’s family: its four members – Veronica (Freya Mavor), her parents (Emily Mortimer and James Wilby) and her brother (Edward Holcroft) – are all, in their different ways, painful company, even from the safety of a cinema seat. Billy Howle is convincing in the moments at which the seemingly affable Tony expresses urgent, angrier feelings. When he first shows Tony to his guest room, Veronica’s father jocularly tells him it’s OK to pee in the wash basin if need be; after Veronica has bid him a chaste goodnight, the frustrated Tony masturbates over the basin. Having torn up the postcard he’s written to Adrian accepting his friend’s theft of Veronica, Tony types a letter telling both of them what he really feels and wishing them all the very worst for the future. It’s a strong moment when Billy Howle’s face discloses the vindictive pleasure that Tony is getting, as he composes the letter, from finding the vitriolic mot juste.
Back in the present, the older Tony meets up with the older Veronica (Charlotte Rampling) and she tells him she’s burned Adrian Finn’s diary. (The forename and monosyllabic surname connect this diarist, inevitably and unhelpfully, to Adrian Mole.) Tony is driven to find out more about Veronica and takes to just about stalking his old flame. He sees her in the company of a man in his late thirties or early forties (Andrew Buckley), whom Tony assumes to be the love child of Veronica and Adrian. This man – who has learning difficulties of some kind, perhaps autism – is indeed the son of Adrian and shares his father’s name but Tony then discovers that Veronica is not his mother but his half-sister. It’s the fact that his diary had been in Sarah Ford’s possession rather than Veronica’s that makes the revelation that Adrian moved from a relationship with the daughter to one with her mother obvious to the reader. Translating the book to the screen only reinforces the lack of surprise: Veronica’s cockteaser tendencies are more evident; Emily Mortimer overdoes Sarah’s uneasy flirtatiousness with young Tony on his visit to the family.
Tony’s discovery of Adrian Junior and who begat him virtually coincides with his own daughter Susie’s giving birth. This combination of events transforms Tony – in the film – into a suddenly and improbably nicer person. Waiting with Margaret at the hospital, Tony tells her that she and Susie are the most important people in his life (in fact they seem to be just about the only people in it). Those bah-humbug routines in the early stages were, we now see, designed to pave the way for Tony’s Scrooge-like conversion, as he invites the astonished postman in for coffee. Ritesh Batra enjoyed a well-deserved international success with his previous film, the authentically heartwarming The Lunchbox, but, though he claims that the novel of The Sense of an Ending ‘really speaks to me’, he’s too benign to work with the grain of Julian Barnes’s cool tone and more misanthropic outlook. The casting of the central role betrays what Batra wants to make of the story. As usual, Jim Broadbent is interesting and engaging to watch but playing an unlikeable character doesn’t come easily to this actor, who also seems reduced in a part that suppresses his natural eccentricity. (He resembles Julie Walters in both these respects.) We never really believe Broadbent is the intolerant, buttoned-up man that Tony Webster seems to be: when he turns over a new leaf, Tony also turns into something closer to what we think of as the real Jim Broadbent. Ritesh Batra ends up giving us the worst of both worlds: he can’t offer a persuasive account either of why Tony became a misery-guts or of why he finally changes his spots (and how he’s able to do so).
It’s sometimes said that minor novels tend to make better movies than major ones, and that what seemed slender on the page can acquire greater substance on screen. The Sense of an Ending – which, at 163 pages, is arguably a novella rather than a novel – might seem to fit the bill for this kind of transmutation but the film ends up feeling not richer but merely longer than the book. Although well enough acted across the piece, it’s full of poorly conceived scenes. Tony is supposed to be an uncaring father until he belatedly sees the error of his ways yet he accompanies the inexplicably hopeless Susie to an ante-natal class so that he can say embarrassing Dad-like things there. The classroom sequences at Tony’s secondary school are awkward – Matthew Goode is wasted and uneasy in the small role of a teacher repeatedly bested by Adrian (Joe Alwyn) in discussion of theories of history – though the extra-curricular smart-aleck conversations involving Tony, Adrian and their two friends Colin (Jack Loxton) and Alex (Timothy Innes) are better. The sixty-something versions of Colin and Alex are played by Peter Wight and Hilton McRae respectively: Tony arranges an implausible reunion – the three men seem not to have seen each other for decades – so that they can show him, old fogey that he is, how to use the internet to research Veronica. The supervisor of the disabled group of which Adrian Junior is a member tells Tony that he can’t disclose confidential information about those in his care. In the next breath, he does just that to put Tony in the picture about Adrian Junior’s relationship to Veronica and parentage.
In the book, Tony’s later school and university years were in the 1960s, and you assume he’s recalling them from the present day. (You tend to assume too he’s about the same age as Julian Barnes, who was born in 1946.) The historical setting of the film is much less precise. When the young Tony spends his weekend with Veronica’s family, Sarah, in particular, has a definitely sixties look; she then illustrates her enthusiasm for Philip Larkin by reciting the opening lines of ‘Aubade’, which first saw the light of day in 1977. After learning from Adrian that he and Veronica are now in a relationship, Tony uses one of a drawerful of monochrome photographs (there’s not a colour one in sight) to construct his no-hard-feelings postcard to Adrian; a black-and-white television is on in the same room. Yet Tony sticks on the postcard a first-class stamp from a book of the kind that was introduced in 1989. It’s possible Ritesh Batra and Nick Payne have the fancy idea of presenting the past as a place that’s absolutely separate from the present but, within itself, essentially undifferentiated. It’s also possible that these anachronisms are simple carelessness.
5 April 2017