PICTURE this: a picnic on a leafy hill on a warm summer’s day. The clink of glasses, the popping of corks. Suddenly a red, hot-air balloon bumps sleepily into view, comically attached to an elderly gent desperately tugging on the rope.
Inside the basket, a panic-stricken young boy. A gentle gust threatens to sweep both to disaster. Four strangers rush to help. They grab the basket to stop the balloon floating away. A puff of wind lifts them all off the ground. Three of them let go. One of them bravely hangs on. About a mile away he falls to his death.
Welcome to one of the most startling opening chapters in contemporary fiction. It was written by Ian McEwan. Now Enduring Love is a film by Roger Michell. The scenario is a gift to any film-maker with a flair for the unexpected. But how Michell films the consequences is the true measure of his skill.
The book is a comic, mad, philosophic quest to understand love and sacrifice. The film has to persuade us that the characters are worth the effort.
Let me put it like this. Daniel Craig is the hero, Joe, and one of life’s eternal hangers-on. He loosens his life-saving grip on the basket because, well, almost everyone else did.
If no one panicked there wouldn’t have been a disaster. But Joe does. He has his stodgy career to think of, and a romantic rest-of-life to polish off with his perfect girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton).
Then there’s Jed (Rhys Ifans), a scruffy nobody, who also let go. Jed has an alarming belief in fate. He thinks that sweaty, giggly, freaked-out Joe is the most beautiful person he’s ever met, and he makes his feelings felt by stalking the academic for the rest of the film.
While Joe tries to fathom his guilty feelings about the balloon accident, Jed hunts him down in restaurants and on street corners. In fear of his life, Joe leans on his unbelieving girlfriend who proves as supportive as a cardboard lamppost. The brilliance of Michell’s film is how lightly he wears the book. Joe Penhall’s adaptation is one of those rare collectible items: a script that carves wonderful dramatic sense out of a complex literary crisis.
Not easy to do when the hero behaves as if he’s delusional. There are significant concessions of course, some more grating than others. Craig’s hero Joe is no longer a science writer but a college lecturer. His partner Clarissa, renamed Claire, is no longer a Keats scholar but a hip-hop, Brit-art sculptor. And the deranged stalker, Jed, is not a man of independent financial means but a trampish loon.
The comic relief, supplied by a family of rum gangsters who sell Joe a gun in the book, is sadly snipped, as are the encounters with the police. But the slightly hateful portrait of a smooth London couple whose smug lives are punctured by one surreal incident, is as fresh on screen as it is on McEwan’s page. I’m in awe of the novel. I love the film. Might this be the best way to enjoy two frightening and subtly altered worlds?
