Barnaby Thompson‘s Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean, assessed by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and posted this morning (5.22):
“From the outset, David Lean was using movies to express who he was. We associate [his films] with the word ‘epic’ (the opposite of ‘intimate’). But Maverick spins on the counterintuitive reality of what a personal filmmaker Lean was.
“By the time he made Brief Encounter (’45), Lean had already married and divorced Isabel Lean, abandoning both her and the son they had together, and he was in the middle of his fraught marriage to Kay Walsh, an actress who would be the second of his six wives, with hundreds of flings in between and on the side. His divorces ultimately left him scrambling for stability and turned him into a kind of moneyed vagabond, living out of suitcases.
“He was successful but rootless, and as Maverick goes on, and we hear the stories of how these relationships foundered and fell apart, something strange happens. Lean’s flawed love life starts out sounding typical enough, and then it comes to seem sordid and opportunistic and finally, in a strange way, it becomes borderline funny, because we hear excepts from the letters Lean would write, and he sounds just like the ardent geeks of Brief Encounter, though the truth is that he was a hound — a hound who needed to convince himself, in every case, that he was having the love of a lifetime.
“Lean was hawkishly handsome with a purse-lipped grin, which in later years made him resemble a genteel English David Lynch. But his polite façade masked a driven, at times raging ego of a personality.”