“People don’t change,” laments Nick (Jim Broadbent). “They do,” counters his wife, Meg (Lindsay Duncan). “They get worse.”
Such melancholic sentiments permeate every fibre of this well-observed dramedy from director Roger Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi. In fact, it’s Nick’s inability to hold his sharp tongue that’s forced him into early retirement, leaving him the time (but scarcely the money) to embark on a 30th anniversary encore of their Paris honeymoon. Alas, the return to the site of such promise only reinforces their discontentment with the hands that life subsequently dealt them. They launch witty broadsides with impunity but save their most cutting remarks for one another.
Kureishi’s incisive writing ensures that every memorably acerbic quip is countered by a moment of unsettling honesty. The increasingly fraught script also displays a keen understanding of how behaviour becomes more entrenched and even amplified over time, often leaving us teetering at the precipice of self-parody. (Jeff Goldblum appears as Nick’s former colleague who’s devolved into the caricature of a scholarly sophisticate.) Likewise, Kureishi and Michell revel in detailing how long-term partners come to complement one another (for better and worse), lending Nick and Meg the air of a deadpan stand-up duo.
Fittingly, the film doesn’t build to a grand romantic gesture but rather free falls to a frank cataloguing of failures and disappointments. Broadbent and Duncan land the finish with panache, allowing Kureishi to suggest that even once the bloom is off the rose, it’s still possible for the stem to remain sturdy and prickly as hell.
