Scaffolding

There are two kinds of scaffolding — i.e., the framework one constructs to enable the making —or remaking — of a more permanent construction. 

But what building will you dedicate yourself to do? The literal construction of some worldly thing, some edifice, or that more rarefied project — building a deeper, more human and responsible self? In an Israeli film, this question takes on significant political weight.Hence Asher's skirmish with a Muslim student who presumes to wear a shirt similar to his.

For Milo Lax, the only scaffolding that counts is his business, the construction sites that he runs and wants his son Asher to take over from him. He has that Edifice Complex that today drives so much industry, politics and most dangerously, education..

Milo is an ex-con who still barely checks his anger and violent impulses. His growth in life inhered in his managing to maintain something of a relationship with his 17-year-old son Asher after his wife left him. 

And build a successful scaffolding business. But of course, he’s only in on the beginning. Lax just puts up the scaffolding, in preparation for the construction crews to come do the major work.

Literal construction is all that Milo can see in his son’s future too. “When will you ever read a poem, see a play, read a book?” he rhetorically asks him. He insists Asher cover for him at work instead of studying for his matriculation exams. “Don’t go too high,” he orders, on the scaffolding as in life. 

Asher is tempted to accept the limitations his father sets. He too has a short fuse, violent impulses, and has serious learning disabilities to boot. 

But he also shows signs of curiosity, however minor and illicit. He searches idly through a client’s house, stealing a Russian doll, then his teacher’s, where he stumbles upon a forbidden secret. Here Asher intuits the appeal of entering someone else’s world, which we non-construction types do through literature.

His English teacher Rami offers him a glimpse of the other scaffolding, the world of literature, morality, questions, thinking, debate. He engages the boy in discussion. He tries to amend his brutishness. 

When Asher overhears Rami assigning another class to record questions they would ask of someone, Asher takes on the assignment. He submits the questions he could never ask Milo. 

While Rami teaches his class Greek tragedy he lives out his own. Unable to deal with his own existential doubts he kills himself, leaving his unnerved students and a bereft pregnant widow. 

The film ends with Milo and Asher grabbing a fast breakfast wrap in the truck, en route to the school. There Asher is to be questioned by police and perhaps arrested for breaking into Rami’s flat and finding, then airing, his suicide note. 

Finally Rami’s teaching gets through. Asher asks Milo the questions he couldn’t before: Why were you so strong in my life? Why did you and mom have me and then break up? Why didn’t you ever read me any stories? How do loving and beating go together? Those questions clearly define that family’s unquestioning, brutish dynamic.

Asher asks those questions of a man who was never interested in the earnest questions of life, just the scaffolding. We don’t know if he’ll answer or deepen his distance from his son with yet another evasion. 

But those questions are the significant scaffolding Rami unwittingly left Asher with. Can Asher finish the job with the real construction? He can’t count on his dad, who does only the other scaffolding. His scaffolding is Lax. 

Whatever happens at school or with his father, Asher is on his own. But at least he has been introduced to literature, to ideas, to questioning — the important questions, not the knee-jerk belligerence of the Israeli teen. 
      Who knows? Maybe Asher will make a movie.

Simon and Theodore

The title’s focus on the two male leads suggests the film’s main theme is the range of possible forms of manhood. That understanding Theodore’s mother shows him and Simon’s wife him. 

The two men have a symmetry. Simon eagerly awaits the birth of his son, hoping that will lead him into balance and maturity. Theodore undertakes a bar mitzvah — the ritual of becoming a man — in hopes of reuniting with the Jewish father who abandoned him and his mother Edith just after his birth.  

Where Simon has been hospitalized for beating up on himself, Theodore is in trouble for fighting at school. Both have difficulty expressing themselves, connecting to others, controlling their impulses and handling their anger. Both are emotionally disturbed, Theodore afflicted with Teenage and Simon with an odd, guilt-free brain disease. In one dark night of the souls, under the pressure of their respective urgent needs they manage to help each other.  

In a comic replay of the theme, Edith’s work colleague removes his ostensibly macho moustache in hopes of attracting her. It works, but mainly because of the care and commitment he shows when he comes to the hospital after work to check on her and on Simon’s wife’s delivery. He quietly demonstrates the manly virtues Simon and Theodore need.

But the women establish their own symmetry, making humanity trump manhood. Edith is a security guard, Rivka a rabbi, a neat parallel.  Theodore tricks her into preparing him for the bar mitzvah by claiming he has his parents’ approval and they will attend. We see little of the congregation’s dynamic, just the solicitous elder Aaron, but our sense is that the woman rabbi is wholly accepted, even with her feral husband. Outside the synagogue, the Jewish-Gentile distinction is there but not a point of conflict or emphasis. They're part of the same social web. 

The film’s climax involves parallel suspensions of a law. If Edith’s not being Jewish would normally disqualify Theodore from a bar mitzvah, his preparation has given him a focus, a new support and at least the hope of reconnecting with his father. 

Through Theodore, Rivka meets Edith, which ends up facilitating her son’s birth. Through Rivka, Simon meets Theodore which facilitates the meetings with the one’s father and the other’s son. More importantly, when Rivka finds herself assuring Edith that "Simon would rather die than hurt your son," she discovers her own confidence in Simon as the functional father of her child.

Theodore’s outlaw spirit prompts Rivka and Edith to break the hospital rules so Simon in the psych ward can meet and hold his new son. So rules, whether religious or institutional, may sometimes have to be broken in the interests of helping people. Humanity should trump legalism.

In the comic replay of the women’s relationship, waitress Caroline has to deal with Simon and Theodore when they can’t pay for their dinner. When they offer to work it off, the dishwasher scolds their encroachment on his job. “Next time just dine and dash like the others do.” By calling Theodore’s father, Simon saves Caroline from having to pay their bill — and gives the dad the chance at last to do something for his abandoned son — as well as for his effective replacement, Simon.
        Despite those careful parallels, the film never seems schematic. It’s a fresh, very original drama with heart, emotion and a healthy respect for human irregularity. If it focuses on a particular religion its overriding value is the unspoken yiddish term, Mentshlichkeit. Humanity. 

Sorry to Bother You

This richly inventive satire may have been 10 years in the making but it speaks trenchantly to our moment.

The title is the telemarketer’s opening gambit, but it also works as a pseudo-apology to the film viewer for interrupting his entertainment-time with a rude awakening to our harsh social reality. The profit-uber-alles ethos is propelling us into a fascist state. 

The initial satire targets corporate salesmanship. Management create an illusion of “family” and “team” to harness their commission-only drones to sell delusions of success through unnecessary products like encyclopedias. (There’s an endangered species.) This is a bleak view of our gig economy.

But the telemarketer’s prime customer has a larger humanity to numb. They offer Worry-Free Living, a sweeping assurance policy that will guarantee its clients a life of work, “security,” minimal comfort, in short, an updated version of slavery. Company head Steve Lift carries the promise of improvement in his name. 

Even its glossy commercials reveal the system’s total abandonment of privacy, of individual living. In exchange for guaranteed — i.e., unending — labour the clients enjoy living in rooms full of bunk beds, with drab uniforms and meals of slop provided. This is the no-worry life that can seduce individuals to resign their humanity. The ads don't even try to hide this dehumanizing.

In offering to meet all its workers’ earthly needs, that company seems to promise a kind of socialism. Instead it delivers a tyranny, a total reduction of its workers to a brutish life. Here the film parallels the conversion of the pretence to populism in America and Europe into right-wing fascism.  

Company head Lift takes his dehumanizing one step further. He is using a drug to turn his serfs into equine-sapiens, humans with exploded muscle strength but with the heads of horses. This brutalizing makes human labourers all the more efficient. For a saving grace, they get the horse’s schlong too.  Every cloud….

Our nebbish hero Cassius Green grabs the telemarketing gig as a last resort. His surprising flair gets him promoted to Power Caller, which llifts him to meeting the impressive Steve. Having succeeded as seller, Cassius is now converted to product. Lift offers him $100,000,000 to undergo the horse change and work as the company’s agent in the workers’ union for five years, after which a serum will — hopefully — return him to human normalcy. He gets to keep the schlong.

Instead of accepting Cassius tries to expose Lift’s nefarious scheme. But the company’s spectacular profits valorize even that evil practice. Money talks; who knew? Only by submitting himself to painful abuse and humiliation on TV can Cassius air his scandalous revelation. It falls to the artists to convey the harsh reality which entertainment glosses over.

Hence the political activism of Cassius’s artist girlfreind, Detroit. She swings a sign-company’s advert on a street corner, but her real calling is politically driven art. In addition to her paintings and sculpture, she does a performance piece in which she also maintains dignity in the face of the audience’s (invited) abuse. That anticipates Cassius’s strategy. 

Detroit’s very name evokes the America of economic and racial injustice. In his name Cassius combines the “slave name” of the revolutionary fighter Mohammad Ali with the society’s exclusive hunger for the long green, which also reduces Cassius to Cash. 

The central characters may be black but in the film’s major concern race gives way to class. The traveling labour organizer -- aptly named Squeeze -- is Chinese. This struggle is not black vs white but Haves vs Haven’ts. 

In their speech style Cassius and Detroit have left behind their street-smart. They speak white like Will Smith. But Cassius’s sales success lies in his affecting an even whiter tone, the voice of the Privileged/Confident/Carefree. That’s economic not racial. That class voice sells and makes him a huge success—only to doom him to fulfill his user’s baser intentions. Cassius’s success not only pulls him away from his striking colleagues but dooms him to his boss’s designs. 

This dystopian Oakland satires sends a clear message. Voters of the West unite. You have nothing to lose but a dehumanizing tyranny.

Winter Hunt (Winterjagd)

The film’s last shot brings to darkened life the favourite painting Anselm earlier described. In the eponymous “Winter Hunt” a small hunched figure that stumbles through the cold field is both the hunter and the hunted. Lena’s splintering the frame prefigures her exposure of the old Nazi guard Anselm’s false history. She breaks the picture, then his story.

  Identifying with the painting, Anselm feels unfairly hunted by stories about his Auschwitz past. Lena turns out to be his new pursuer whom he briefly holds as his prey until her evidence pierces his defence. 

Anselm has studiously denied his past, in the face of trials and public persecution. Here Lena’s candid self-revelation forces him to confront his guilt and its poisonous hold over his family for 70 years. Exposed, he outs the old Nazi beast still within him. The little Jewish girls in the camp were flattered to be raped, he avers. So much for his indignation at being unfairly accused. 

Anselm initially dismisses Lena as a left-wing nut determined to persecute someone. Anyone. But her own story reiterates contemporary Germany’s ineluctable tie to its past, with its attendant, recurring responsibility. 

By confronting its historic evil, modern Germany recovers its moral compass. Confirming that bond, Lena initially introduces herself as Astrid, which is the name of wrier/director Astrid Schult. That makes both and the director’s and the character’s quest intensely personal. 

Housekeeper Elena is the serviceable, passive citizen, the righteous gentile, who serves what she takes to be the innocent victim. Unaware of the Jewish revenge, she brings a pork roast. The homonymous Lena and Elena are parallel outsiders. Where Lena confronts Anselm, Elena senses a problem but lets Maria turn her away from it. 

  Lena and Maria can also identify with the figure in the painting, both as Anselm's victims and as they hunt down their true origin and assume moral responsibility. On this, Maria follows the younger Lena.

  Maria is arguably the film’s moral centre. Her father’s lifelong faithful defender, she reluctantly admits the visitor and tends to her injury. That, like Anselm’s fate, is self-inflicted. When Maria injures herself in overcoming Lena, she extends her parallel. Lena’s certainty about Anselm’s guilt sets Maria finally to challenge her father’s self-serving version of history. 
     The film abounds with paradoxes. Here it's the Nazi cowering in fear and persecution while the Jew, Lena, lays siege and establishes the truth. The sterility of the Nazi cause is signified by Anselm never knowing he had a son, here losing his loyal daughter  and having his destiny sealed by his granddaughter.
     The shifting winds of German politics have only renewed this story’s compulsive currency -- and extended it through Europe. This very intense thriller was made for German TV, which would give its tight home setting an additional impact. Watching a home invasion at home is all the more chilling. Still, it’s a compelling cinema experience too.

The Last Suit

When Abraham, the 88-year-old Jewish tailor from Buenos Aires, arrives in Madrid he reveals he’s living King Lear’s folly. Decades earlier, when his favourite daughter Claudia (i.e., Cordelia) wouldn’t match her two older sisters in describing her love for him he disowned her, gave them his estate and refused to speak to her again. Having now unhoused him, the sisters doom him to a Home. He’s also at risk of losing a leg. Hence his oedipal limp. Indeed, he has named his right leg Tsures (yiddish for "troubles.").

Helpless and freshly robbed, he now reluctantly turns to Claudia for help. He squeezes out a strained apology for having so abused her. 

She corrects his story in one respect. The other sisters paid her her fair share after all. She gives him the grand he needs to get to Poland, but makes no effort to admit him into her — and her little daughter’s — life. There is none of Cordelia’s forgiveness, nor Lear’s reconnection.

But here’s the question: What the hell is a Lear rehash doing in a Holocaust survivor saga? 

It must be the heart of the film. It’s such a prominent jarring intrusion that it must bear the point of the exercise. 

Maybe the point is that the Lear echo is a famous story. Story-telling is a prominent early motif in the film. Abraham’s delightful, doomed little sister was enchanting in her capacity to invent stories and to share them with audiences. Her own story ends when the Nazis snatch her from Abraham’s grip. Not for her the immortality of the stars that she kept afloat in the night. 

So the film is about living through stories. After all — as has been remarked — the Holocaust is such a monstrous occurrence, with such unimaginable cruelty and an unfathomable scale of evil and inhumanity, that approaching its reality beggars the imagination.   
     How else deal with the unimaginable than by sending out stories that may at least point to its implications, however incompletely. What cannot be fathomed can perhaps be outlined or pointed to.

So this film is not so much the story of one survivor’s experience but a demonstration of how the extremities of history can only be approached in discrete fictions. The power of stories makes a history possible. That’s why the hero is named Abraham, the father of the Jewish people (as well as of the recycled Lear’s daughters) and why he’s that most stereotypical of Jews, the tailor. And the wanderer.

Though Abraham is 88 this is still a bildungsroman, a sequence of episodes through which the hero moves toward self-realization. Typically, the episodes stand quite separate. In the first, the sly grandfather negotiates a bribe with his even craftier granddaughter, to get a family photo to impress the old folks at the looming home. He then has a Kafkaesque scene with a travel agent in some shadowy warehouse. 

Subsequent scenes advance his mission but probably mean even more to the people he engages with. In passing he gives them stories to tell: the young music student on the plane, the hotel clerk who sings in a club, the German woman anthropologist whose Jewish history studies led to her learning yiddish. As they variously help him their scenes become dramatic tales to enrichen their bios. And lives. They all take their leave with warm, lingering embraces.

The main story is the reunion of the two old friends, the two tailors, at the end. They were so close as boys that when Abraham escaped from the Nazis, Piotrek fought off his own father in order to save their benefactor’s son. 

Though they have not communicated for over 60 years, and neither knows the other has survived, both men have such a need to complete their story that they recognize each other on sight. This film is less about life than about our need for stories.  

So, too, Abraham’s flashbacks whether in his dreams or his delirium. Especially the train  scenes seem culled from film-lore as much as from personal history or experience. 
Perhaps this theme is especially pertinent to a Holocaust survival film coming from Argentina. That country, after all, welcomed so many Nazi officials after the war. Of course it has a significant Jewish population now, but the history remains problematic. Jews have been attacked there, including a serious attack on a synagogue. Argentina was recently embarrassed when it buckled to Palestinian pressure and cancelled its national soccer team’s planned exhibition match in Tel Aviv. So the history — like the best stories — keeps retelling.  

Wajib

Palestinian writer/director Annemarie Jacir uses the male-bonding Road Movie genre to provide a cross-sectional survey of Christian Palestinians’ civilian life in Nazareth.  The focus on Christians here is striking because their life is far different from what we normally see depicted there. This is a comfortable, well-educated, successful community, though still chafing under Israeli control. 

As father and son hand-deliver invitations to the daughter’s wedding they recover warm memories — and revive old tensions. The father raises the son’s hackles with his reflexive sneer at a homosexual, his Old School moralism, his fibs of convenience.  

  Of course, even in this comfortable part of the troubled area if anything can go wrong it will. That includes the mistaken date on the printed invitations. A melee erupts when a motorist jumps the line at a gas station. Shadi’s fancy Italian shirt is the casualty.

As the father is a popular local teacher he’s well-known and respected in the community. But that comes at a cost too — his need to appease and even to befriend the Jewish watchdog in his school. The father is the family pragmatist. To comfort his neighbours he fibs about his son’s career, his unlikely return, his romantic commitment. 

That service is why the father stayed. On the phone he describes the superlative — and apparently mythic — beauties of the land, contrary to the visible evidence of broken neighbourhoods, amassed garbage, the general ruins. He has been living in the real Palestine, serving his family and the community, without the romanticism of any myth or cause. Hence the film’s title: Duty.

In contrast to his staying there to raise his two children, his wife wanted more than that life could give her. She abandoned her family to run off with a lover to America. Her eagerly-awaited return for her daughter’s wedding depends on her dying husband. The father stills feels her humiliation. 

Son Shadi similarly escaped the confines of his father’s life. He made a career in architecture and found a modern love in Italy. His lover and her family are more militant, the PLO. His father disdains of their lavish living abroad, the self-service and futility of their warfare and the amorality of his son’s relationship. His dignity lay in staying and serving his community at home, however that may have compromised him.

We hear about the school’s Jewish spy Ronnie and we see two Israeli soldiers enjoying felafel, but otherwise the film focuses on the Arab community. Several of the friends are Arab Christians, as we see from their decorated Christmas trees, the Santa market and the remarks about having “a winter wedding.” A neighbour worries about the growth of ISIS in the neighbourhood. 

We don’t often see such a spectrum of Arab life in the area. Hence the hosts’ offers of coffee segue into booze. One young girl, her family out, tries to seduce Shadi. His father’s old school-mate Georgette extends a similar invitation to him.

The cultural cross-section extends to the car radio. The father wants to play the old style traditional singer who will perform at the wedding. The son prefers the nostalgia of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” which collects additional irony from the earlier scene, when the father accidentally kills “an Israeli dog” — that’s white. A news report addresses the corruption charges against PM Netanyahu and his wife’s denials. Even on this spectrum of swarthy there’s the implication of white privilege. 
     Despite this careful structure and schematic, the subtleties in the performances, script and direction give this film the saving sense of life caught in the flow. It’s a rich glimpse into particular lives in a troubled place and time we more commonly experience from the larger stories in the headlines. 

To Dust

This wildly inventive black comedy declares its religious concerns in its three opening quotations. First two quotes share the screen: (i) the Kohelet assurance that upon death our body returns to its origin in dust and our spirit to God who gave it; (ii) Jethro Tull’s “God is an overwhelming responsibility.” The third — in response — is the framing Tom Waits ballad “Blow Wind Blow.”  Even apart from its valedictory lyrics, his rasping, indeed gravelly, voice is an emblem of the coarsened life due our rocky, dust-based corporeality. The wind he invokes is the ruach, the breath or spirit.

In short, the film is a Talmudic examination of the complex tension between body and soul, but in the contemporary vernacular: a Jethro Tull-mudic meditation. For the “overwhelming responsibility” of God necessarily falls upon man. “Shmuel” (or Samuel) means “he who hears God.”

Upstate New York Hassidic cantor Shmuel has trouble dealing with his wife Rivkah’s death from cancer. He can’t even make the ritual incision into his jacket lapel. 

Mainly he has nightmares about his wife’s decaying corpse. He sees her big toe explode. He is tormented by the suffering she must be feeling.  

Thirty days later, he can’t end his mourning period. So he launches a pseudo-scientific investigation into the process of a body’s decay. That is, he has lost the visceral belief that her true spiritual nature has escaped her body. 

In a comic replay of the theme, his two young sons believe their distracted father has been possessed by a dybbuk (who entered through his big toe). They try to exorcise the demon. 

On both levels the characters are concerned with the interconnection of the physical and the spiritual. Paradoxically, the boys appear to have the greater faith. For Shmuel’s obsessive empathy with Rivkah’s corpse suggests he can’t believe she’s already escaped her earthly body. His doubt disables his cantorial voice.

Through that lapse in faith, Shmuel’s quest leads him into a world of increasing secularity. It starts when the coffin seller, concluding that no possible sale is at risk, drops his reverent mien and starts conversationally to swear. From then on the dialogue hilariously pits the pious against the profane. That is, the world of the spirit dramatically collides with the dirt.

Shmuel’s orthodoxy is challenged again when he has to talk to the young woman at the community college, a dilemma he “solves” by writing her notes instead. 

Even this challenge pales before what follows when Shmuel suborns the reluctant college Biology teacher Albert to determine Rivkah’s current physical condition. Albert is teaching the need for an efficient eco-system. He trashes stuff in frustration with his class and his own mistakes. Shmuel’s intrusion grows from an irritation into his own obsession. 

Unlike Albert’s students, Shmuel acts on the teacher’s words, leading him into a sequence of profane actions, including the burial of one pig, the killing of another, the digging up of several dead, all debasing to the orthodox Jew, and all accompanied by the teacher’s verbal profanity. 

Shmuel’s degrading quest fails until the two men come upon a “body farm” where the recently deceased are held for study. Even here, they are initially frustrated by the system’s order, until they enter at night. Then Shmuel steals a glimpse of a body comparable to Rivkah’s. There he finds an assuring beauty. The system works.

The security guard who catches them finally unites the holy and the secular by their mutual inclusion. From her own family losses to cancer, she understands Shmuel’s needs so lets the men leave unarrested, uncharged. But most telling is her language: she is at once among the film’s most profane speakers and yet the most religious. She sends the Hassidic widower off with Jesus’s blessing.                               So what does God tell us through this Shmuel’s ordeal, quest and conclusion? Who knows?
     Perhaps that rituals help us deal with our most painful losses but may not in themselves be enough. A personal reconciliation may lie beyond the traditional forms and values. Perhaps our amphibian nature may require our engagement of the profane as well as the holy. The Lord may indeed move in miraculous ways His wonder to deform.  

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan’s screenplay for his own novel provides some fascinating examples of creative adaptation.

For example, the novel ends with Edward remembering Florence walking away from him till she is out of his sight. In the corresponding scene in the film the newlyweds stand at opposite ends of the screen with a cluttered rowboat between them. They speak across the abyss. As the raging Edward lets Florence walk away, the camera withdraws until Edward is left alone on his side of the screen. But the boat also sinks  out of sight, below the horizon. That is, his ship has sailed. The film adds a verbal/literary metaphor.

More dramatically, McEwan alters the ending by fleshing out Florence’s future and giving the couple a reunion that provides an emotional release — for the characters as well as  the audience. Edward’s closing remarks expand into an emotional scene that the screenplay adds to the novel. 

After a 50-year separation the erstwhile lovers independently fulfil their romantic pledges in the concert hall they ambitiously predicted. She plays the Mozart he could “sing;” he sits in C3. But more important than this literal realization, they finally find themselves in the same emotion, their love now tempered by regret. He weeps helplessly at the quintet’s standing ovation. Tears stream down Florence’s face, dramatizing the novel’s remark that at every performance she ruefully remembered him. 

The novel closes on Edward’s private remorse, his recognition that he ruined his life by his inaction when Florence walked away. They did love each other and perhaps could have resolved her sexual repression over time and with understanding.

 Edward was always too quick to anger — as in his avenging the insult to his Jewish friend. Indeed the violent rage that worried Florence may have been a subconscious element in her attraction: it made him something like her short-fused father. A boat scene keeps the subtle possibility of his sexual abuse of her as a child, the tennis scene the father’s rage over her perceived breach of his privacy. 

Edward chillingly raises a rock when he attacks Florence for not keeping her sexual oath. He throws it into the sea, but not until he has admitted the possibility of his violence against her. The careful graduation of the pebble sizes along the beach — possibly the novel’s central metaphor — parallels the film’s constant nuancing of emotions and their tacit expression. Sailors determine their location from the size of the stones. We navigate our lives according to the proportion we allow our emotions.    

The film’s ending steps outside Edward’s perspective to round out Florence’s future. She married her quintet’s cellist, who had long desired her and himself accused her of hiding her forcefulness under an apparent shyness. He overcame her rejection, married her and developed the sexual relationship signified by their consequent children. 

This Edward first learns when her daughter Chloe buys a Chuck Berry record for Florence’s birthday. Her name and “bouncy and merry” description prove her lineage. Edward doesn’t follow Chloe very far, opting again to withdraw from Florence. But he goes to see her perform at her quintet’s final performance. While Edward retreated to his own musical taste, Florence retained her attachment to the music he introduced her to, even as she advanced her classical career. 

Their career successes similarly contrast. While her college musical group succeeded for  50 years (including the young violinist Florence imposed), Edward abandoned his passion for History and ended up managing a range of vinyl record shops (a pop culture version of history/anthropology). He remarried but had no children and remained broken by his rejection of Florence. They both may have started with Firsts at school, but in overcoming their respective emotional blocks Florence exceeded Edward. 
      Usually an ending imposed in a screen adaptation simplifies or debases the original. The common motive is to provide the happier ending that the mass cinema audience is assumed to demand, more than the solitary reader. McEwan’s addition here serves that purpose in heightening the emotional impact. But it remains wholly congruent with the intentions and effects of his own source. It deepens rather than softening the oiginal.