Nosh 116: 'On Chesil Beach' & More

By David Elliott

    

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of On Chesil Beach

Before literature or film there was geography. Chesil Beach is a curving strand of pebble (“shingle”) beach on the Dorset coast near Weymouth, South England. Fabled shipwrecks occurred there in old smuggler times. Now the place is so cherished that when the esteemed novelist Ian McEwan took a few pebbles, to inspire him at his writing desk, he was threatened with an environmental violation fine of two thousand pounds. He returned the pebbles.

McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach was nominated for the 2007 Booker Prize, and later he scripted the film. He lost his pebbles but got a diamond: Saoirse Ronan. If you have not been blind at the movies these last ten years, you know that Ireland’s Ronan, 24, is one of the supreme rising talents, terrific in The Lonely Bones, Hanna, Brooklyn, Lady Bird, etc. And if you are lucky to have caught Chesil’s fly-by American passage, you know that Florence Ponting is another Ronan  vessel, her use of a crystal English accent as fine as her Sacramento teen-talk in Lady Bird.

In 1962 Florence is a ripening beauty, keen leader (violinist) of her new string quartet, and just took a “first” in music at college. She’s no aristo, but there is a crust of family comfort she enjoys poking. Mother (barely used Emily Watson) is a snob rich in affectation. Father (Samuel West) is a factory owner and a bully. Their interest in Flo’s passion, classical music, is mainly connected to status. Suddenly she turns her fair eyes on Edward (Billy Howle), a lower-rank schoolmaster’s son, handsome in an unfinished way, brainy about history but shy, awkward and a mild rocker (he likes Chuck Berry, whom Flo finds “merry,” but when they dance with joy it’s to Mozart).

Ed’s mother, mentally damaged after a bizarre accident, is a fragmented, artistic soul, and Flo reaches out to her with instinctual kindness. The woman (ace Anne-Marie Duff) is moved, and her husband (excellent Adrian Scarborough) instantly urges Ed sotto voce to “marry that girl.” This is  the tender family Flo wants, and love ordains marriage. But the nuptial night brings that almost unspeakable (for Flo) thing: sex. She has already been freaked by an explicit sex manual, and we wonder if there might have been abuse (the father?). Her virginity is like a last, Victorian crown colony, a Gibraltar of anxiety (her purity flag is a plush blue dress). Ed, himself nervously virginal, is no David Niven. The testing encounter leads them back to Chesil Beach, where every pebble seems to be a facet of their pent-up, then free-flung feelings.

To spill here the story’s incoming tide would be critical malpractice (forget any comparison to Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity). Making his feature debut, director Dominic Cooke has wonderful English vistas from cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, precise period touches, music that eloquently spurs and spins emotions, and a cast inspired to rival Ronan. She and Howle transmit a quivering sincerity, urgent with youth. They empower the story, with its flashbacks from the wedding night and, later, forward.

McEwan made some changes from the book. The new ending, more emphatic than the novel’s late ruminations, delivers a surplus crescendo of sentiment. A better closure might have been the scene before, so richly wistful in a record shop (an episode also devised for the movie). Neither Jane Austen drama nor a Harlequin romance, On Chesil Beach may be, as some have said, “minor McEwan.” The film is never a minor experience.         

SALAD: A List

25 Special Movies of British Romancing

With their romantic stars and year:
Pygmalion (Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, 1938), Wuthering Heights (Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, 1939), That Hamilton Woman (Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, 1941), I Know Where I’m Going! (Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey, 1945), Brief Encounter (Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson, 1946), A Matter of Life and Death/ Stairway to Heaven (David Niven, Kim Hunter, 1946), The Red Shoes (Moira Shearer, Marius Goring, 1948), King Solomon’s Mines (Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, 1950), Simon and Laura (Kay Kendall, Peter Finch, 1955), Loss of Innocence (Susannah York, Kenneth More, 1961), Becket (Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, 1964), Goodbye Mr. Chips (Peter O’Toole, Petula Clark, 1969), The Go-Between (Julie Christie, Alan Bates, 1971), Maurice (James Wilby, Hugh Grant, 1987), Sid and Nancy (Gary Oldman, Chloe Webb, 1987),  We Think the World of You (Alan Bates, Betsy), Truly Madly Deeply (Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman, 1990), Sense and Sensibility (Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, 1995), Persuasion (Amanda Root, Ciaran Hinds, 1995), Among Giants (Rachel Griffiths, Pete Postlethwaite, 1998), Shakespeare in Love (Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, 1998), Yes (Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, 2004), Atonement (Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, 2007), Bright Star (Ben Whishaw, Abbie Cornish, 2009), The Deep Blue Sea (Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, 2011), Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, 2017).           

                                                                         

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

As WWII gave way to the postwar era, Orson Welles considered a political career, even wrote a syndicated column. Lasting remnants of that phase are recordings he made of famous speeches. One of the finest and simplest is his rendition of John Brown’s eloquent words before his hanging in 1859. Here is the speech, available on YouTube:

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“The early star system of the 1910s and ‘20s favored full-frontal personality, codified visually. 'Almost from the beginning,’ writes James Naremore, ‘movie stars were regarded as aesthetic objects rather than as artists, or as personalities who had a documentary reality. D.W. Griffith and other directors strengthened the ‘organic’ effect by inserting details from an actor’s real life into the fiction.’ So, Lillian Gish in True Heart Susie gazes upon a photo of her actual mother cradling baby Lil. What Gish began so sweetly, Brando consummated viscerally in his self-referential Paul in Last Tango in Paris (call it True Heart Marlon). All actors tap themselves, though the deepest aquifer eludes many.” (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter in my 2016 book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Lillian Gish and Robert Harron in a sepia-tinted image from D.W. Griffith’s sensitive romance, True Heart Susie (Biograph Films, 1919; director Griffith, camera operator G.W. Bitzer).

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