Director James Marsh has boldly, maybe even sacrilegiously, given us a Hollywoodised biopic of Samuel Beckett. It starts with Beckett surreally escaping the Nobel ceremony to talk in private with a doppelganger confessor – a breezier, more worldly self in a rollneck sweater and jacket – and glumly wondering to whom in his life he should penitentially give the prize money, a guilt list which ushers in the flashbacks.
It isn’t hard to imagine what the man himself would have said about this movie, but though a little hammy, it is well acted and tells the story with verve, tackling the paradox of Beckett’s bleak fictional universe of stymied inaction and his dramatic real life of service in the French resistance and romantic intrigue. There’s a very thoughtful, weighted performance from Gabriel Byrne as Beckett, austere and droll, with Fionn O’Shea as the younger man, supercilious and idealistic. Sandrine Bonnaire plays his wife Suzanne, on whom he cheated with translator and critic Barbara Bray, played by Maxine Peake.
