Jim Broadbent Gives The Sense of an Ending a Mesmerizing Center
By Jordan Hoffman, Vanity Fair Mar 7, 2017, 9:17AM
Jim Broadbent and Harriet Walter in “The Sense of an Ending.”
It’s foolish and reductive to ascribe a national character to a movie—but, by God, The Sense of an Ending may just be the most British movie ever made. At its core, beneath a great many layers of storytelling filigree, the drama emerges from a central revelation: “Oh, dear! Years ago, I said something impolite.”
Director Ritesh Batra (best known for The Lunchbox) does a remarkable job of making the movie’s mystery seem much more transgressive than it is, and he is aided by an outstanding performance from Jim Broadbent. There’s a heady swirl throughout the film that cavalierly zips around its timeline. Flash-forwards give you a sense of the ending to come and Broadbent oozes such empathy that it’s not too hard to put yourself in his shoes.
Broadbent (Iris, Topsy-Turvy, Brooklyn) is Tony Webster, an insular and melancholy divorcée who runs a small antique-camera shop. Memories of his younger years already keep him in a bit of a daze, but it’s worse when he gets a notice that a woman from his past has died and left him something.
Emily Mortimer (center), in one of the flashback scenes in “The Sense of an Ending.”
What the something is, we don’t quite know yet. His relationship to the woman is teased through recollected glimpses, a bit of voice-over, and some confessions to his ex-wife. We’re led to believe at first that she is Veronica (played as a young woman by Freya Mavor), as that’s who is waiting in the yard, lit by a sepia street lamp, in Tony’s recurring vision from a college party. (This transformative meeting just happens to occur as “Psychotic Reaction” plays on the nearby hi-fi.)
But Veronica still lives in the present, played by Charlotte Rampling in an unusually un-glamorous turn. In fact, it is her vivacious mother (Emily Mortimer in flashbacks) who has died, and what she’s bequeathed Tony is the diary of an old school chum.
Jim Broadbent and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) in a scene from "The Sense of an Ending".
Fear not: you will eventually find out what’s in that diary (the film is based on the award-winning Julian Barnes novel of the same name). Ritesh Batra takes all the clues and intrigue — and what resonates is Broadbent’s performance. He is an older man, but not an “old man,” at least not yet—and while the muscles in his life have atrophied, he’s got a little strength left for one more flex.
Batra gets in the zone during small moments. A meet-up on a bridge (straight from a spy film) segues to a sit-down in a tourist area restaurant. Broadbent wants so much to shout “TELL ME!”—but first, there’s figuring what kind of coffee to order, or maybe the tea. And the kid at the next table banging blocks isn’t really helping matters any.
These sequences (and there are many of them) wind up being far more meaningful than any “aha!” twists. Perhaps the ultimate twist, then, isn’t that a common man has found himself entangled in a mystery—it’s that a mystery has accidentally wandered into the story of a common man.
Charlotte Rampling and Jim Broadbent in “The Sense of an Ending,” based on the Man Booker prize-winning novel.
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