Indian filmmaker Ritesh Batra is following up his 2013 breakout hit The Lunchbox with his sophomore feature and his first in English with an adaption of Julian Barnes’s Booker award winning novel The Sense of an Ending. This is the quintessential British tale of a retired middle-class man who settled for a mundane life rather than his dreams, and still carries this sense of frustrated anger that he lost control of so much of what happened along the way. His family quite rightly call him out for being a curmudgeon.
Although he has technically retired Tony (Jim Broadbent) still opens up his tiny shop in London everyday where he repairs cameras, a passion that started after Veronica his first girlfriend in his college days gave him his first Leica. Now divorced from his workaholic barrister wife Margaret (Harriet Walter) who he still sees on a regular basis, and with whom he is the father of Susie (Michelle Dockery i.e. Downton’s Abbey Lady Mary) a 36 year single lesbian about to have her first child.
Tony’s peace is shattered one day when he receives a letter from a lawyer to advise him that he has been left something in the Will of Veronica’s mother Sarah (Emily Mortimer). Thanks to a whole series of flashbacks back to Tony’s college days when Veronica first took him home to meet her parents, we could see that the wickedly flirtatious Sarah had taken a shine to her daughter’s boyfriend. However Veronica’s brother Jack’s (Edward Holcroft) conversation with Tony was peppered with such homoerotic overtones, it seemed that practically the whole family was after him.
It turns out that actually Veronica wasn’t that much into Tony anyway and after putting off making out with him, she eventually ended up dating one of his best friends the rather earnest Adrian (Joe Alywn from Billy’s Long Halftime Walk ). When Adrian finally broke the news to Tony by letter, he angrily replied with a spiteful and mean-spirited response, and would have nothing to do with either Veronica and him ever again. A decision he came to regret when very shortly afterwards he learned that Adrian had tragically taken his own life.
Flash forward to his present life and a rather annoyed Tony is told by Sarah’s lawyer that he has in fact been left Adrian’s diary, but Veronica who is the Will’s Executor is refusing to hand it over. He selfishly vents his anger on Margaret who is struggling to keep working even though she has a broken leg, and with Susie who is about to give birth any moment. It’s as if everything must always center around him.
He surreptitiously finds out where Veronica (Charlotte Rampling) now lives and confronts her about the missing diary as he feels that this will be the key to what happened at that time, and why it all ended so badly. He will however never ever get his hands on the diary, but he does eventually discover the shocking and very surprising truth, which rightly leads to a great deal of regret on his part as he must accept that his memory is not as factual as actual reality.
In his determination to get what Veronica says is ‘to close the circle’ Tony has to admit in the end ‘our life is not a life, but a story, mainly told to ourselves.’
A lesser actor than Broadbent would have made the self-centered Tony too obnoxious to be liked even a little, but his subtle performance manages to bring us round to wanting to be able to grant him some redemption in the end. The whole movie has such a superb stellar cast that are happy to let this story unfold unhurriedly that help make it the wee gem that it is. The twists to the plot keep us guessing to the end, and full credit to Barnes for not tying up all the ends in any predictable fashion.
This entertaining wee movie is a must for any anglophiles who like their dramas to have a sense of maturity where people can even accept their own mistakes, and take responsibility for them at the end of the day.
