On Chesil Beach

"On Chesil Beach" would be an uncomfortable sit even if director Dominic Cooke's film version of the Ian McEwan novella had figured out an effective tone and style for these clammy little scenes from a repressed, thwarted marriage. What worked on the page, more or less, struggles on screen, however, even though (and maybe because) McEwan adapted his own 2007 story. It's set mostly in 1962, just as Britain's postwar era was about to give way to the Beatles and the new freedoms. We're along and near the Dorset beach where newlyweds Florence, played by Saoirse Ronan, and Edward, played by Billy Howle, are beginning their lives together. "On Chesil Beach" is built upon the fact of how quickly and definitively two people who love each other can run aground in a failure to communicate, to open up, to work through their demons. The ending is very different from the novella, and I was surprised at its shameless, ruthless emotional effectiveness. After so much discreet internal suffering, a direct attack on the tear ducts took me by surprise. The rest of the film never sticks with a given wavelength for very long, before nervously trying something else. 1:50. 2 stars. -- M.P.