On Chesil Beach (2018)

When I read the novel On Chesil Beach a number of years ago their was a scene where I so disagreed with a characters decision that I threw the book down in frustration. That is the only time I can remember having an emotional reaction of that physical intensity to a work of literature. So I steeled myself ahead of time for this film version. It is the story of a virginal couple on their wedding night at hotel on Chesil Beach in England in 1962. Florence (Saoirse Ronan, who interestingly made her first big impression on the screen in the adaptation of another McEwan book, Atonement in 2007) came from a wealthy but distant family of the upper classes, who other then her sister she could never really relate to, while her husband Edward (Billy Howle) came from an aspiring family of lower class roots, his father a headmaster at a small school, his mother mentally unhinged for as long as he's known her.

The couples making it to this moment is quite an accomplishment in its self, much stood in the way of their ever being together. While the bulk of the framing story takes place over a period of around six hours, we see the journey this sympathetic couple took through flashbacks. One of the things I love about McEwan's writing is a tendency to digression, it's seeming meandering, but its meticulous filling of the gaps, and even more intentional leaving of ambiguities in the narrative. Since the author is adapting himself here, his 2007 novella of the same name, the films feels very organic, very true to its source material. But the ability of the movie to succeed lays almost entirely on the leads, and both Ronan and the lesser known Howle are up to the task, giving generally subtle, and at times quite moving performances.

This is a beautiful, sad movie, I found it quite affecting. The story uses its historical setting, and sympatric young leads to evoke ideas of innocence. Yet McEwan being McEwan he wants to explore the ambiguity in that innocence, its perils and its promises. Those paths which are taken and those that are not. What the world may have gained through sexual liberation, and what through the coarsening of those mores it may have lost. It is about love, and context, and circumstance, expectations and mistakes. It finds a power there that can still stagger. ****