And so they do. The arrangement Liam has just walked into involves Grant’s stern paterfamilias coping with, as it turns out, not just a surly adolescent and a chilly wife, but a family rendered dysfunctional by profound loss.
That’s not a spoiler. The film opens with Liam giving an interview about his debut novel, which is described in just that way — as the story of a “brooding patriarch presiding over a grief-stricken family” — as the interviewer asks Liam where he got the idea for it. “The Lesson” is his answer, told in flashback.
Good writers borrow; great writers steal, as Sinclair says over and over in the film, capably directed by Alice Troughton, a director of TV series making her feature debut. (Apparently, first-time screenwriter Alex MacKeith took that maxim to heart. The line comes from T.S. Eliot.) And accusations of literary theft figure prominently here, after Sinclair and Liam trade manuscripts one day, each asking the other to read his work. For the great author, it’s a request for proofreading; for Liam, it’s a chance to get advice from his brilliant artistic hero.
Liam is no slouch in the brains department. But when he speaks his mind too freely, daring to critique the ending of Sinclair’s novel, it opens up a fissure in their once-frosty relationship, which had started to thaw into a kind of warm mentorship. Strong feelings are stirred, and secrets percolate upward in this tense and warily unhealed household, like bubbles through the water of the lake that lies at the bottom of the garden, in which Liam has been forbidden to swim.
So far, so good. Delicious, even. The first two acts of the “The Lesson” are a delicate dish of ambition, pride, resentment, feelings of failure and other spicy emotions. The cast is flawless, down to Crispin Letts as the Sinclairs’ butler: tightly wound and tight-lipped, with the ability to keep secrets of his own, as you will learn.
But just as Sinclair seems to have missed the mark with the ending to his book, at least in the eye of Liam, so too does “The Lesson” — initially so full of suspense, cagey maneuvering and surprise — take a turn for the obvious, devolving into a tale of a taboo love, sexual jealousy, betrayal and violence.
Echoing Liam’s review of Sinclair’s work in progress, I’d call the first two acts of the film cleverly constructed, fresh and fascinating, yet marred by a climax and conclusion that are unworthy of what came before. If there’s a lesson here, in a marvelous movie that curdles into easy mush, it’s that endings — or at least the great ones — are hard.
R. Area theaters. Contains strong language, some sexuality, brief nudity and smoking. 103 minutes.