“the Sense Of An Ending”: As Good As The Book? No, But It’s An Excellent Adaptation

By Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post Three stars. Rated PG-13. 108 minutes. “The Sense of an Ending,” Julian Barnes’s elegant Man Booker Prize-winning novel, receives a tasteful if necessarily limited adaptation in Ritesh Batra’s film. Tasteful, because few could argue with Batra’s genteel, reserved tone and approach; limited because no movie can do justice to the interiority and ambiguity that have been polished to a high sheen by Barnes over the course of his decades-long career. The inherent superiority of the written word notwithstanding, Batra has done a credible and even commendable job of translating Barnes’ intricate prose to the screen, opening up some of its corners, burrowing into its time shifts and, most gratifyingly, elaborating on a few otherwise marginal characters. Here, Jim Broadbent plays Tony Webster, a divorced retiree who lives a largely solitary existence in his well-kept townhouse.