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.
But surely the scene stealer is Aiden Gillen, with his very enjoyable impression of James Joyce (has Mr Gillen performed in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties yet?). Gillen’s twinkle-eyed yet faintly malign portrayal shows how predatory Joyce was towards Beckett, his young amanuensis and translator in prewar Paris, with an almost abusive scheme to pair him off with his troubled daughter Lucia (Gráinne Good) and so get this young woman off his hands. When Beckett let him down, Joyce did not forgive, and perhaps a good deal of Beckett’s creative minimalism can be seen as a traumatised reaction to Joycean giganticness.
Robert Aramayo plays Beckett’s Jewish friend Alfy Péron, who though he survived the camps died soon after the liberation – another occasion for futile, guilt-filled brooding. Screenwriter Neil Forsyth avoids the “fail better” cliche and gives us instead a fragment of Godot in the title. The resulting film is watchable and persuasive, with a spoonful of sugar in the melancholy final image.
• Dance First is released on 3 November in UK and Irish cinemas.
