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Enduring Love
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The
stories, novels and scripts of Ian McEwan (The Comfort of Strangers [1991], The Good Son [1993]) often come out
rather oddly on screen – as unwieldy amalgams of art-film conventions and
sensational mystery-thriller elements. Since he has his name on Enduring Love as Associate Producer, one
must infer he approves of the singular mess that has, in this case, resulted.
There
are at least three movies fighting for attention inside Enduring Love. The first, in the vein of Peter Weir’s Fearless (1993) or David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), addresses the weirdly altered
destinies of those who together survive a catastrophic trauma – in this case,
the surreal air-balloon accident that intertwines egghead Joe (Daniel Craig) with
the desperately needy Jed (Rhys Ifans).
The
second movie is an Alain Botton-style, dumbed-down dissertation of the meaning
(or meaninglessness) of life. Joe is the author of a book on “the art of empathy
and understanding” – astonishingly so, since these qualities are exactly what
he most lacks.
The
third movie is an intimacy thriller with Jed as
the Beast from the Lower Classes who becomes an obsessed stalker, disturbing
Joe’s already rocky union with a luckless artist, Claire (Samantha Morton).
These
three strands effectively cancel each other out long before Roger Michell’s
overly fussy film limps to its predictable conclusion.
MORE Michell: Notting Hill © Adrian Martin March 2005 |
