The Sea **
Dir: Stephen
Brown. With: Ciaran Hinds, Sinead Cusack, Natascha McElhone, Rufus Sewell. 87
mins. Cert: 12A
More proof writers should
be kept from adapting their own work comes with Stephen Brown’s glumly listing
psychodrama, in which John Banville reduces his Booker Prize-winner to jumbled
pound-shop Proustisms. Grieving scribe Ciaran Hinds’ return to the coastal
getaway of his youth strands us amid oddly artificial, advert-coloured
flashbacks; there, we’re left waiting for some formative trauma to reveal
itself, while rent-a-rake Rufus Sewell struggles to pull off an Adge
Cutler-like hat-and-neckerchief combo. Hinds is a strong, wounded presence, but
the laboured structure cuts insistently around him to get at a psychology
mostly scrambled in translation. This Sea’s
just too choppy.
The Sea opens in selected cinemas from today.
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