★★
(M) 108 minutes
"I wanted life not to bother me too much," observes Tony Webster, the elderly narrator of Julian Barnes' 2011 Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending. When a fictional character says this kind of thing, you might hope they're about to be plunged into an unlooked-for but thrilling adventure, like, say, Cary Grant in North by Northwest.
![Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling in The Sense of an Ending.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170810183626im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/b/4/0/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwb3xn.png/1495749641614.jpg)
But not much ever does happen to poor Tony, either in Barnes' slim novel or in this new film adaptation with Jim Broadbent in the lead. Directed by India's Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox) from a script by the British playwright Nick Payne – both up-and-comers in their 30s – the film suggests yet again that bringing modern "literary" novels to the screen is a shortcut to boredom.
Adaptations of this kind tend to be faithful and unfaithful in exactly the wrong proportions – blurring the sharp edges of their sources without altering the way the action takes place mostly inside people's heads. With true literary perversity, Barnes' novel sets its most dramatic events at a double remove, recounted many years on by a character who seemingly had little to do with them.
The film retains this structure, at least on the surface. Living quietly in semi-retirement, Tony learns that he is now the rightful owner of a diary kept by his old schoolmate Adrian (played in flashback by Andrew Buckley). This leads to his mulling over various incidents from long ago involving Adrian and his other schoolfriends, as well as his first girlfriend Veronica (Freya Mavor).
In between flashbacks, we follow Tony bumbling around London in search of the diary itself, while rabbiting on about his quest to the women in his life, including his ex-wife (Harriet Walter), his adult daughter (Michelle Dockery) and, eventually, the present-day Veronica (Charlotte Rampling). None of them take more than a cursory interest in his ramblings, an attitude the viewer may be tempted to share.
The issue here isn't simply that a film requires more immediate, physical action than a book does. Rather, it's that Barnes' novel is explicitly a meditation on the gap between reality and the stories we shape from it, between the past and what we choose to remember – implying not only that Tony is an unreliable narrator, but that any narrator must be unreliable to some degree.
However, the conventions of cinema do not work like this: whatever appears on screen is immediately before us in the present tense. Thus when the film flashes back to Tony's boyhood, we assume that what we are seeing is what really happened, even if key moments have been left out (and even if a sketchy sense of period leaves it unclear if Tony came of age in the 1960s or '70s).
Of course, there are ways Batra could have preserved the unknowability of the past. He could have avoided flashbacks altogether, as the writer-director Andrew Haigh did in his recent, somewhat similar drama 45 Years, starring Rampling as a middle-class Englishwoman who, like Tony, faces a revelation that challenges her sense of what her life has meant.
A far more sophisticated filmmaker than Batra, Haigh maintains a visual and spiritual distance from his characters, leaving us space to draw our own conclusions. He doesn't spell out philosophical points in sententious voiceover, nor does he tie things up in a neat bow, as Batra and Payne do in a newly devised ending that sits awkwardly with what has come earlier.
To be fair, Batra manages a few visually expressive touches of his own, using focal shifts to suggest Tony's isolation in 21st-century London. But mostly the film relies on Broadbent's skilfully ingratiating performance, which allows us to see Tony as a familiar comic type: a crusty old fogey, often misguided but vulnerable enough to be sympathetic at core.
All this couldn't be further in spirit from the source material, where part of the point is that the "real" Tony remains a mystery, even or especially to himself. Where Barnes is subtly disturbing, Batra and Payne seem bent on reassurance – in the usual patronising way of filmmakers trying to win over older viewers, imagined as the kind whose main desire is not to be bothered.