Jim Broadbent books it in The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes's novel makes its classy leap to the screen

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      The Sense of an Ending

      Starring Jim Broadbent. Rated PG

      The Sense of an Ending offers the kind of literary pleasures that low-budget, actor-driven movies do so well these days. Adapted by playwright Nick Payne from Julian Barnes’s recent novel of the same name, this Ending was directed by Mumbai-born Ritesh Batra, who had an international hit with The Lunchbox.

      His first English-language effort is similarly scaled, in that it stays intimate with a few middle-class citizens attempting to reconcile their own self-absorption with the needs of others. The tale is anchored by that Mike Leigh veteran Jim Broadbent, bringing gentle humanity to Tony Webster, a prickly bugger who might have proved insufferable in less relatable hands.

      Semiretired Tony runs a small camera shop in London, and still seems strongly tied to his ex-wife (Harriet Walter) and grown—in fact, hugely pregnant—daughter (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery). As in the recent 45 Years, a placid Englishman’s notion of order is upset by a sudden blast from the past.

      Here, it’s the legal notice that Tony is due to receive something by way of his first love, Veronica. She’s played, in flashbacks set during their Cambridge days, by Sunshine on Leith’s Freya Mavor, with handsome Billy Howle as the timid young Tony. Emily Mortimer shows up briefly as Veronica’s much, um, livelier mother, and Joe Alwyn plays a key cohort and eventual romantic rival.

      Barnes’s book was divided into two first-person sections, with the first written during callow school days and the second, larger part set in modern days, with the assumptions of youth now called into question. The title itself was borrowed from Frank Kermode’s 1967 book of essays about the strategies of fiction. In fact, some interrogatory sensibility is lost in the filmmakers’ structural decision to integrate past and present. They also yield to the purely cinematic temptation to mix actors from both time periods, occasionally resulting in more work for viewers, rather than character illumination.

      Still, the cast is so fine, with 45 Years’ chilly Charlotte Rampling showing up in the final act, and the offbeat London settings so damply soothing, you end up not caring if the movie seems imperfectly finished.

      Watth the trailer for The Sense of an Ending.

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