Director James Marsh's film on the life of Samuel Beckett, starring Gabriel Byrne and written by Neil Forsyth, infuses surrealism into a conventional format.
It would be hard to imagine a genre more antithetical to the modernist sensibility of Samuel Beckett than the biopic. The Irish writer who relocated to Paris, found inspiration in the French language and became one of the most innovative literary artists of the second half of the 20th century, was allergic to the uplifting pieties and sentimental profundities that are the mainstay of screen biographies. Publicity and self-promotion were anathema to this most private of authors, who died in 1989.
Exuding a weary melancholy, the actor betrays an incongruous longing for the confessional, unflinchingly depicting the elderly Beckett stoically dragging his carcass to the finish line. Physical travail being an inexhaustible source of black comedy and a recurring metaphor for the human condition in Beckett's writing, the depiction of mortal decline is on point. But an air of fabrication hangs over the film, even as it hews to a factual outline.
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