Film: The Sense of an Ending (108 min)
Distributed by: CBS Films; Lionsgate; StudioCanal
Directed by: Ritesh Batra
Written by: Nick Payne
Based on: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Released: March, 2017 (USA)
I remember a comment made by the late film reviewer, Roger Ebert, in a talk he was giving on films about older adulthood. He pointed out that older adulthood is the only age which gives one the ability to look both forward and a long ways back and that older adults are the richer for this ability. I am struck by how seldom this dual perspective is explored in films that portray aspects of elderhood. There is, of course, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, made notable by its dream-rich handling of life review, and often cited by gerontologists for its review and integration of life stages. Erik Erikson, in his first in-depth exploration of older age, used the film’s main character, Dr. Isak Borg, as a “case study” and thereby contributed to the canonical status of this 1957 film (Erikson, 1978). However, since then, only a handful of films out of the hundreds that deal with older adulthood have played on this kind of developmental activity that is so relevant to later life.
In The Sense of an Ending, we finally have another film that reflects on a character’s early and later life personas. The film’s main character, Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent), is jostled out of his somewhat routinized and placid life by a letter from the mother of one of his first serious girlfriends in college some 45 years earlier. The letter, sent by a barrister, also refers to an item that the mother says she thought Tony would find interesting. The item, however, is not included with the letter. Upon inquiring with the barrister, Tony discovers that the item has actually been willed to him by the now recently deceased mother; the reason it was not given to him along with the letter is that her daughter, Tony’s former girl friend, has retained it. Tony also discovers that the item in question is a diary of one of his high school friends who later, while in college, had committed suicide. This friend had also taken up with Tony’s girl friend, Veronica, shortly after Tony and she had broken up. Tony is initially perplexed and then driven to find out just why his long-ago girlfriend is not releasing the diary.
Charlotte Rampling and Jim Broadbent in “The Sense of an Ending.”
Within this intriguing story line, we are presented with several flashback scenes of Tony’s college days and his relationship with Veronica. We also hear occasional narrated reflections from Tony on who he was when he was a young man, hampered by insecurities, and who he has now become. We also see him pondering and discussing the missing diary situation with his ex-wife, with whom he has maintained a friendly and fond relationship. This interplay gives us another window into Tony’s persona at this stage of his life—and we find him to have a somewhat curmudgeonly air about him.
Interwoven throughout the flashbacks and within Tony’s occasional narration is the question of how history is defined and perceived, and how one’s own personal history is viewed by oneself. Without the testimony of first person witnesses, how accurate is the retelling of history? (We see young Tony (Billy Howle) and his classmates engage this question in a history class.) And how reliable is our own memory of our personal self at an earlier time? Did others see us as we saw ourselves? Is our own memory of ourselves objective, or is it formed by the successive layering of our subjective memories over the years? These compelling questions are cinematically framed within the cutting back and forth between Tony’s early-life romance with Veronica, and his later life reflections and memories brought on by the letter and the tantalizingly withheld diary. One scene in particular establishes this search for early to late persona integration. The older Tony is seen wandering through the same college student party in which we saw him earlier in the film as a young man—as if searching for clues to make sense of who he was then compared to who he is now.
Tony becomes driven by his need to obtain the diary (and his need to win against the thwarting of that desire by his long ago girlfriend). Another part of the finely wrought intrigue of the film is watching the lengths to which Tony goes to find the older Veronica (Charlotte Rampling), and the unsettling discoveries that come from a meeting with her. Without revealing these discoveries and ruining the film, I can say that the discoveries lead to even more questioning for Tony of who he was back in his insecure late teens and early twenties. And his questioning can open up for the viewer this question: Does who we are at our core as a young adult remain the same throughout the rest of our life, or does it shift as we develop and mature?
In order to ask this reflective question though, you might have to look past the weakness of the dramatic over-reach inherent in the film’s ending. Much of the inner tension in the film’s plot is based on a letter from Tony’s youth that seems overplayed in its significance. The film also portrays a marked shift in Tony’s character once he works through his obsession about a reconnection with Veronica. This change, though, feels a bit too facile. Tony basically becomes a kinder and more thoughtful person with everyone from the mailman to his ex-wife. It feels like another over-reach in order to close the film in an upbeat and resolved way. This change in Tony’s character does, however, add more to the central question of core-shifting. An insightful viewer might ask just how much we can effect such a change at our deepest core.
The Sense of an Ending will probably remain a somewhat obscure film. At this writing, it is being screened mostly in those few “art house” theatres that fortunately still exist to play films like this. But it should also soon be available via streaming or DVD. In spite of the dramatic over-reach of its plot, The Sense of an Ending is the kind of film that will readily engage students because of its intriguing interplay of intrapersonal-intergenerational perspectives. By that I mean it triggers one to reflect on the interplay of self-identified personas at two different points in one’s life. Students could have a rich discussion, based on this film, on “looking ahead to looking back”—that is, an exercise where young adults project who they will be 50 years from now when they will be able to look back at themselves 50 years earlier. Who will you be in fifty years? How different will you be from who you are today? What will have been involved in that development? This is a deeper question than “what will I do and what will my life be like”? It is a “who will I be” question.
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