Passion, along with the delicious disorder that so often accompanies it, is only allowed into the film toward the end.
The imaginative daring of Dominic Cooke’s On Chesil Beach springs from its willingness to render repression sexy.
At 221 pages, it’s a tightly knit piece of fiction, an elegant examination of a complicated problem.
Palin’s depiction of Hamish Melville, the impossibly ethical activist against which Mabbut compares himself, is handled unexpectedly.
Joe Wright’s version of Ian McEwan’s novel is visually snappy but emotionally inert.