As a narrative, David Hare's Dreams of Leaving … has the confined simplicity and elegance of an Eric Rohmer moral tale….

And yet the film is a disappointment, all the more frustrating for being so tantalizing, for offering elements that are never quite connected. In a Radio Times interview David Hare has said that in Dreams of Leaving he was trying "to push aside the business of being a teacher or a moralist". Perhaps in this remark lies the source of my frustration, for in this film Hare seems to have chosen a means of proceeding, through the use of voice-over, that is essentially moral: a man in early middle age looks back on his youth, and tells the wistful story of a failure of recognition. Conrad would have approved such a structure….

The film proclaims moral intent, moral progress from Innocence at the opening of the play—"I...