Faith healer

Neil Jordan returns to form

by Peter Keough

THE END OF THE AFFAIR. Directed by Neil Jordan. Written by Neil Jordan based on the novel by Graham Greene. With Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, Stephen Rea, Ian Hart, Sam Bould, and Jason Isaacs. A Columbia Pictures release. At the Jane Pickens and Showcase (Route 6 and Warwick only).

It's traditional that a deal with the Devil can be broken -- but a bargain with God is for good. So goes the moral of Graham Greene's crankiest novel, The End of the Affair. Sourly autobiographical, it wallows in bad faith; though taking the part of the Devil's advocate, its narrator -- embittered Greene stand-in Maurice Bendrix -- in effect is offering a polarized catechism, a litany of anti-God denunciations that if held up to a mirror read the opposite.

The novel's obsessive, meditative, even whiny style and substance are a challenge for the screen -- the one previous adaptation, Edward Dmytryk's in 1955, was a dud. Maybe because the theme of unattainable love is close to his heart, as seen in Mona Lisa, The Miracle, and The Crying Game, or maybe because he saw it as a chance to redeem himself after the debacle of In Dreams, Neil Jordan warms to the task. Although sometimes strained and schematic (his pagan, lapsed Catholicism is at odds with Greene's puritanical, new-found faith), Jordan's Affair rings true. It's a deft cinematic translation of a daunting novel and a formally challenging investigation of character and point of view. More important, it's a chilling exploration of those questions that can really stymie a soul -- is there a God? what is love? -- and that if honestly answered, as his characters discover, can change a life forever.

At first it seems Jordan is going to be overly faithful to the text: not only does he have Maurice (Ralph Fiennes, tight-lipped in his randiness and self-loathing) recite in voiceover the novel's opening lines ("This is a diary of hate"), but he provides a close-up of the typewriter keys hammering said lines into a sheet of paper. But hate is not as big a problem with Maurice as perception. Can one love or be loved when unseeing or unseen?

The question bugs him because he has by chance fallen in love with Sarah (a pale Julianne Moore, who will grow paler still), the wife of Henry (Stephen Rea, paying for his sins in Guinevere by playing an ineffectual prig), a government minister whom Maurice is researching for a novel he's writing. It's London on the eve of World War II and everyone is keyed up, so after his first meeting with Sarah at a party, Maurice takes her to a film adaptation of one of his own novels (a self-reflexive motif that goes nowhere), feeds her onions, takes her home, and humps her on the sitting-room floor within earshot of her husband. ("Will he hear?" he asks. "He wouldn't recognize the sound," she answers.) So begins a five-year fling abetted by Henry's obtuseness and Nazi air raids.

Quick work even by today's standards, but already Affair has grown cubist. Told in elaborate flashbacks, with the same incidents repeated from different points of view with mounting irony and rueful insight, it begins with a post-war, post-affair frame tale in which Maurice, bumping into Henry in the rain (a recurrent fallacy that grows too pathetic), learns that he suspects Sarah of infidelity. As this would entail her being unfaithful to him as well, Maurice perversely goes ahead with Henry's half-hearted notion of hiring a detective, Mr. Parkis (Ian Hart), to check up on his wife.

Although admittedly prompted by a "devil" within him, Maurice's vengeful whim leads him to a confrontation with the nature of fate and divinity. The key to his understanding of what happened is the moment when Sarah ended their affair. After they've made love in his apartment during a V-1 raid, Maurice walks downstairs to check that all is clear; he pauses before a blood-red stained-glass window (a rare burst of color in this etiolated film), that, in silence, erupts around him from a delayed buzzbomb explosion.

What happens next is seen in two versions: Maurice's and, by means of a purloined diary, Sarah's. Maurice survives, but how and why -- a miracle? -- is unclear. What is unambiguous is Sarah's rejection. She will always love him, she says, but she will never see him. Can one love the unseen, he asks. "Maybe that's the only love there is," she replies.

The unseen, of course, is the One whose point of view is beyond that of Maurice or Sarah or Parkis, beyond perhaps even that of the filmmaker. Jordan ably suggests the immanence of the divine through the use of high-angled shots and high-handed ironies. Less effective is his reliance on voiceover passages from the original -- he should have had as much faith in the unsaid as in the unseen. Neither is the melodramatic device of illness -- you know you're in trouble when the phrase "You'll catch your death" is uttered twice in the same rainstorm -- any less creaky in the film than in the novel. Such flaws aside, Jordan's Affair may not restore faith in miracles, but it does lay bare the miracle of faith.

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Miracle worker?

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