Jealousy Marks The Steamy 'Affair'




By Joe Baltake
Bee Movie Critic
Sacremento Bee
Movie Club
January 21, 2000





THE END OF THE AFFAIR

Rated R

Rating: Three stars * * *
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, Stephen Rea, Ian Hart, Jason Isaacs, James Bolam and Samuel Bould.
Writer-director: Neil Jordan. (Screenplay based on a book by Graham Greene.)
Distributor: Columbia.
Running time: 105 minutes.



The torments of a jilted lover get the full Old Movie treatment -- with an anachronistic dose of graphic sexuality for box-office consideration -- in Neil Jordan's "The End of the Affair."

Jordan has painstakingly brought Graham Greene's 1951 semiautobiographical novel about love, marriage, adultery and, yes, theology to the screen with a heightened, British moodiness.

Cinematographer Roger Pratt has given the film a burnished quality so that it seems to ache from loss, thereby visually approximating the confusion of its hero, novelist Maurice Bendrix (played by Ralph Fiennes), who is still brooding about the abrupt end of a wartime affair with the beautiful wife of a man he knew only casually.

The film is set during and after World War II, although it is told by Jordan ("The Crying Game") in nonchronological order, a narrative device that also underlines Maurice's seesawing mental state.

The film opens with Maurice writing what he calls "a diary of hate," which prompts a flashback to a night in 1946 London when he had a chance meeting in the rain with Henry Miles (Jordan regular Stephen Rea), a civil servant married to the woman with whom Maurice had his all-consuming, liberating affair. This is clearly the remembrance of a tortured man drunk on whiskey, struggling to figure things out and locate the one missing piece to his puzzle -- namely, why Sarah (Julianne Moore) ended the relationship.

Henry, who is passive and as forlorn as Maurice (but in a different way), takes his acquaintance home -- to the place where Maurice and Sarah first made love -- and confides in him that he thinks his wife is having an affair. The revelation not only whets Maurice's appetite for more information but also quite naturally arouses his jealousy. What's going on here? He suggests that Henry hire a private detective and have Sarah trailed. When Henry responds in a wishy-washy way, Maurice hires a detective (played by Ian Hart) himself, posing as the rejected man that only he knows he is.

The private eye does his job with his young son (Samuel Bould) in tow, following Sarah to and from a church several times and uncovering her diary, whose details, along with Maurice's reminiscences, provide the film with a structure that's fragmented yet refined. The movie feels like a work in progress, in which we're invited to tag along with Maurice as he researches the very personal book that he's writing -- that "diary of hate."


Greene dedicated his book "To C." -- to Catherine Walston, who was his wartime paramour -- and the film feels like a re-creation (as imagined by Jordan) of what the great author might have done in real life. Anyway, the point of it is that we learn things as Maurice learns them and are privy to his thoughts.

For most of the film, Sarah remains an attractive blur until the big moment when, after making love while bombs explode outside around them and plaster falls from the ceiling, she ends the affair. Sarah's decision comes after she thinks Maurice has been mortally injured and, lost in grief, she prays to God for his soul. It's when she realizes that he didn't die from the blast that Sarah leaves Maurice. The mystery of her behavior has nothing to do with callousness or selfishness but, quite the opposite, with selflessness.

Jordan's greatest achievement here is the series of unexpectedly wild sex scenes that he's dropped into an otherwise very proper plot. Infidelity is more than just a subject of discussion in this film; it's totally objectified as Jordan uses the scenes for the full release that each moment represents. He eroticizes the London Blitz by implying that sex on the sly is even more of an illicit adventure when there is violence all around you.

If his film just misses the mark of greatness -- of being a great sexual love story for adults -- it's because he's dealing with characters who are uninteresting and not worth the trouble of our concern. Actually, "characters" is too generous a word to describe the people in "The End of the Affair." Moore's Sarah, as noted, is a blur, Fiennes' Maurice is a stick, and Rea's Henry is thoroughly dull (so as to give Sarah a reason to cheat).

It's difficult to care when everyone on screen is a blank.



 

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