Even without having read Ian McEwan's novel, I found On Chesil Beach to be a diverting, engaging, funny, heartbreaking, and ultimately cold look at failed romance.
It begins with such promise. A young couple, clearly in love, spending their honeymoon together on a picturesque beach. The flat landscape, shimmering with reflections of sunlight, hints at the transcendence the innocent soon-to-be lovers will experience on their first night together. After a lovely dinner brought to their suite, and some polite if awkward conversation, things get more heated. That is to say, their erotic desires are so constrained by propriety that they are unable to communicate effectively.
Our awareness of their plight is also disjointed -- purposely -- through use of intermittent flashback. We witness the newlyweds meeting after their respective graduations, quickly falling in love, and arranging their wedding. Their families are quite different -- hers is wealthy and offer her higher ambitions while his is humble, poor, and aggressively kind -- but don't seem especially opposed to the union. Instead, we begin to see the two as being in love but nearly incapable of being alone together. This is highlighted during their dinner, as their farcical servers nearly ruin the evening's ambiance. The two make small talk, reminisce, and basically fail to ever meet each other on the same plane.
In an age of cinematic sex so explicit it becomes embarrassing or laughable (Fifty Shades of Grey), it's almost refreshing to see a movie about how awkward sex can be. Even for a married heterosexual couple, constraints of polite society -- trickling down from a lack of relevant education to an inability to communicate about what each wants or doesn't -- can severely (and fatally) limit our capacity to function intimately. Of course, there are other issues involved in this particular story: Edward's romantic efforts are thwarted by his heightened sex drive, while Florence may or may not have been molested by her domineering father.
The climax should be a heartrending confrontation on the beach, as Florence offers to be a platonic wife and to let her husband sleep with whomever he wants and Edward all but screams that he only wants her. And while the film to this point is effectively split between tender drama and farcical romance, the climax reaches a cold plateau that can't quite reconcile the themes at work with the aesthetic of the film. Immediately after, we dive headfirst into a lengthy denouement -- thirteen years later -- that tries to wrap things up in melodramatic fashion. Florence has remarried, borne children, and become the musical success she always dreamed of; Edward's life has been ruined by the woman who said she was incapable of physical carnality.
Though I trust that Ian McEwan -- who adapted his own work here -- is expanding his dramatic vision of his original story, I couldn't help but feel that this ending was anti-dramatic. Perhaps that's his point -- it's all anti-climactic as well, deliberately -- but it drains the themes at work of their potency. Instead we're left with a Hallmark-worthy epilogue that makes you roll your eyes in exasperation rather than tragedy. And the old-age makeup is pretty awful too.
Billy Howle does his best work yet, though, as Edward. If for nothing else, watch this movie for his performance.
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