The Sense of an Ending

2017 "Sometimes what we remember is only half the story"
The Sense of an Ending
6.4| 1h48m| PG-13| en| More Info
Released: 10 March 2017 Released
Producted By: BBC Film
Country: United Kingdom
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

A man becomes haunted by his past and is presented with a mysterious legacy that causes him re-think his current situation in life.

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robertclark-1 This is a film which centres on its main character Tony Webster, played with great subtlety by Broadbent, uncovering some of the unintended effects of earlier actions, long forgotten and submerged under a conventional and safe life. A letter out of the blue from a lawyer reconnects the intelligent but somewhat oblivious Tony to both people and events from his past. In the film, like the novel, this exploration is partly worked out in conversations with his knowing and somewhat arch ex-wife superbly portrayed by Harriet Walter. Even though the memories are Tony's, his wife always seems to be one step ahead in understanding their deeper significance and and recognising her ex-husband's obtuseness and self-deceptions. Through the discussions and flasbacks, a painful affair is slowly uncovered involving Tony's erratic first girlfriend and his best friend from school, and the flurry of interactions between all those involved at the time have powerful and lasting consequences, most of which were hardly foreseen by Tony, who seems to have settled for a lack of curiosity through the long years that followed. It is the unravelling of those consequences and the affect that has on the main character that soon becomes the centrepiece of the film. In fine humanist fashion, Tony is dragged through slow realisation, regret, humiliation, introspection, and an honest reappraisal of what he has become, to finally reach a level of resolution that is both persuasive and heartening. The film and the performances manage to avoid any hint of sentimentality and self-congratulatory smugness in a completely satisfying way. An excellent film!
The Couchpotatoes I have a few problems with this movie and that's why I just rate it as an average movie. One of my issues is that the movie is way too long. It could easily have been done half on hour shorter. Then the movie would have been better. Now the first 45 minutes are just boring to watch. I thought the movie was going nowhere at one point and yawning was the only thing I did for almost an entire hour. The best part of the movie is the end part. That was worth watching. You can't really blame Jim Broadbent for anything, he did his best trying to make it an enjoyable movie to watch. Too bad the beginning was so boring, because the revealing of the mystery was good. But that's just not enough to make it a good movie.
TxMike My wife and I watched this at home on DVD from our public library. When it was over I commented that "it is sort of like reading a novel" and she agreed. That observation is neither good nor bad, depending on what kind of movie one likes to view.Old favorite Jim Broadbent always seems to create very interesting characters, as he does here. He is Tony Webster, retired but running a camera repair business in London. He also specializes in antique Leica cameras and sells them for handsome prices. This is not just an incidental detail, it has a connection to his college days and the girlfriend who introduced him to cameras and photography.The hook in this story is when the mother of his former girlfriend, Veronica, dies the will leaves Tony one item, the diary that belonged to Adrian, his former college friend who took up with Veronica when she and Tony broke up. But the solicitor seems to be having difficulty actually getting the diary to give over to Tony.Tony is persistent, he looks up Veronica's brother and finally finds Veronica, who is very mute about what all is going on, but when pressed she says she burned the diary. All this creates an air of mystery about the whole thing. What is going on? What is she trying to hide? Why is she being so cold to Tony, her old boyfriend?Charlotte Rampling is effective as the current time version of Veronica Ford, as well as Emily Mortimer who plays Veronica's mother back in the 1960s. The thrust of the story in the movie is that our memories are what we make of them, what we choose to believe, what we think the truth was. In his fading years Tony re-lives much of what has happened in his life and gains some new perspectives.SPOILERS follow: The movie uses multiple flashbacks to tell of Tony's past, and in one we learn that Adrian actually killed himself, using razor blades in the bathtub. In his sleuthing Tony observes older Veronica hugging a special needs man, also named Adrian, and he assumes it is her son. But it isn't, it is her brother, older Ardian before his suicide had impregnated Veronica's mother, herself a flirt, and we might assume the realization of that drove Adrian to take his own life. Plus the diary Tony never got to see probably had contents about Veronica's mother, things she didn't want others to read.
dromasca 'The Sense of an Ending' is quite a demanding film. Its target audience is the mature + age, those who have in their minds and souls enough memories that have had the time to be forgotten or intentionally buried. It also demands some patience, as its characters, as many, probably most people in life, do not reveal themselves immediately and are neither exuberant, not very empathetic. It takes time to discover the human motivations of many of us, it takes cinematographic time to discover characters like the one of Tony Webster, the quasi-retired owner of a small shop of vintage cameras in London, who once aspired to become a poet. But then, in cinema as in life, you may be highly rewarded.The story, inspired by the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes, puts on screen a slow build-up of the young days of the main hero, who suddenly receives a small heritage from the mother of his ex-girlfriend, probably the great unfulfilled love of his university years. The almost forgotten affair with a girl named Veronica from presumably a higher class family is discovered by viewers and re-discovered by Tony, as his memories come back, some of them extracted with difficulty, exposed because of the need to share and despite the will to leave some of them forgotten. Actions in the past have had unknown consequences on the lives of other. Veronica was some kind of a mystery for the young man, maybe because of the class differences, maybe because men never fully understand women, or maybe because some dark family secrets that are never fully revealed and do not become more evident even after 40 or more years. The ambiguity of the details is part of the reason I liked the story, as in life out of books and screens not everything can and will be explained. However, the pieces of the puzzle come together and build for the hero and for the viewers an alternate, even if partial, version of the past. The final moral of the story is that changing the past can change the present or even the future. We are not only what we wish to be, we are also what our memories determine to make of us.The British style of living and being, its discretion and understatements fit so well this story. Director Ritesh Batra is only at his second big screens film. I hear that his debut in India with 'The Lunchbox' was kind of a sensation. He succeeds to lead with skill his wonderful team of actors, plays well the card of ambiguity, and seems to understand to details the soul and dilemmas of the characters. Attention however, it's also a personal story, so what we see on screen is always what the hero, Tony Webster sees, what we know is what he can and in some cases chooses to remember. Jim Broadbent is a wonderful actor and succeeds with talent and discretion in the lead role, even avoiding from us to become to engaged with him until he deserves it. I can be only sorry that Charlotte Rampling spends so little time on screen in this film, she is an artist I love and respect. Keeping the mystery around her character is however what was required by the script and needed here. The only more severe fault that I could find is that the younger actors playing the decades back flashback episodes do not resemble in physiognomies or characters their older selves. I could not recognize at all ones in the others. This gap left apart, 'The Sense of an Ending' provided me with one of the most sensible and thoughts-provoking cinema experiences lately.