`End of the Affair' can fulfill a romantic's dreams





By Susan Stark
Detroit News Film Critic
The Detroit News
Entertainment Guide
January 7, 2000




The End of The Affair
Rated R




Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) re-enters Sarah's (Julianne Moore) life in "The End of the Affair."


Romantic dramas, never mind romantic dramas with a wartime setting, are a rare enough commodity at the movies these days that each one holds immense promise for devotees of the form. The End of the Affair at least partially fulfills that promise.


Adapted for the screen by Neil Jordan, who counts such

keepers as The Crying Game and The Butcher Boy to his credit, the new film retains much of the structural complexity and moral wrangling of the Graham Greene novel behind it.


It's a story (some say autobiographical) that begins with a torrid, illicit love affair between a woman stuck in a terminally bland marriage and a handsome, ardent novelist. It's a story that ends with the kind of evidence that qualifies her for sainthood.


Set in London of the blitz era, the film begins with a tight shot of Ralph Fiennes, who plays the writer, banging away at his manual: "This is a diary of hate." In his tortured mind, it emerges, hate is intimately entwined with love; same for spiritual defiance and faith.


Perhaps to grab the attention of the modern audience, Jordan's film plunges rather too quickly and enthusiastically into the carnal business. Early on, for instance, there's a full account of Fiennes's bare buttocks bouncing around on the all-but-obscured Julianne Moore, who plays his paramour and the story's candidate for sainthood. In short, the revealing shot of Fiennes, however artfully lit, does the cause of Jordan's movie no favor. Same for the picture's subsequent account of Fiennes' sexual encounters with Moore, who shows up fully visible and bare breasted in several scenes. Jaded as we are, that kind of image still packs a distracting wallop, especially in a two-hanky movie that clearly wants to be taken ever more seriously as it works its way from physical ecstasy through moral issues to a spiritual conclusion.


On the plus side, Jordan makes superb use of London in the World War II era. The city under siege finally asserts the force of a lead character, one that determines the course of not only great events, but also of distinct, private lives. Fiennes' ruminative writer says as much at one point and he is right. Those who fell in love with Fiennes in The English Patient must be disappointed by his account of another tortured romantic here. It's an emotionally pinched performance right down to the pitiful excuse for a bitter smile that Fiennes wears in moments of pleasure, pain and fury. The character seems dour, above all.

Ever-estimable Moore, beautifully done up in period clothes and offering a spot-on account of the Queen's English, significantly outshines Fiennes. Her work has real emotional range and, pointedly, radiance. Yet, it is Steven Rea who quietly but surely makes the film his own. As Moore's repressed, verbally constipated civil servant of a husband, he moves sinuously from doggedly dull to truly, deeply sympathetic. Atmospheric, intelligent and significantly more heated than it needs to be, The End of the Affair (offers sustenance to starving romantics. It's by no means the great and pithy film it wants to be, though.

A Sony Pictures Entertainment release. Opens today at the Main Art Theatre.

 

Please visit the other link pages on this site:
Ralph Fiennes Links Page

 Ralph Fiennes Astrology Page

Back to the Jennifer Lash Links page
 

Back to the Ralph Fiennes - Jennifer Lash Main Page

This page was created with the Stonehenge.ttf font and is best enjoyed if you
have the font yourself.  If you want it please click on the green name Stonehenge.ttf above to download and install it to your PC.
Sorry not available for Mac's.  Thanks.
 

These pages are Copy written by Mary Sibley.  All rights reserved.
Please do not use anything within these pages without permission.
Please send an EMail to Mary Sibley for permission, thanks.