Friday 18 April 2014

"The Sea" (The Guardian 18/04/14)


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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