12:01AM GMT 26 Nov 2004
On a beautiful summer's day, in rolling hills just outside Oxfordshire, a man called Joe (Daniel Craig) and a woman called Claire (Samantha Morton) gambol about looking for a picnic spot. They are young and, as the bottle of champagne they're carrying suggests, very much in love. Everything feels right: the mood, the tempo, the light. It's one of those moments when you want to stop the clock. To live for ever, drenched in present happiness.
Then along comes a red hot-air balloon inside which is trapped a young boy. Joe scrambles to help the kid's father bring the balloon under control and to stop it floating away into the distance. Men from neighbouring fields do the same, but a sudden gust of wind means they're all hoisted up into the air. Do they do the noble thing and cling on, even though that means almost certain death? Or do they protect themselves and let go? It's a moral dilemma, memorably set up in the opening pages of Ian McEwan's 1997 novel, that comes to haunt Joe, not least because one man, a doctor, didn't let go and died as a result.
The haunting takes a human form. Joe is contacted by a straggly, Bible-quoting outsider called Jed (Rhys Ifans), who had tried to help bring down the balloon and now sets about resurrecting painful, partially submerged memories of that fateful afternoon. Jed thinks they have a special connection. He let go of the balloon, but he won't let go of Joe. He sticks to him, with a fierce affection that he believes is love, and that becomes indistinguishable from stalking. At this point, whether or not we've read the book, it's clear that the film will end with a severing as violent as that which opened it.
Just as well. For Enduring Love has to struggle hard to keep us engaged during its mid-sections. In part, this is because Joe is a philosophy lecturer and therefore gets to expatiate at length about weighty problems - "When we say we're in love, what do we mean?" - which are meant to dramatise the steady erosion of his relationship with sculptress Claire, but which tend to come across as heavy-handed.
The scriptwriter, dramatist Joe Penhall, too often gives the impression that he thinks we're not smart enough to understand quite how deep and paradoxical and mature the film is. Symmetries of personality are overemphasised. Claire, exasperated by Joe's fixation with Jed, shouts: "Do you realise how mad you sound?" Jed, meanwhile, coos: "I'm trying to help you because you're really just like me."
The film, like the book itself, has a structural problem: stalkers are really boring. The relationships they have with their targets reside only in their imaginations and aren't susceptible to articulate explanation. Ifans knows this: his character, for all his protestations of love, is actually pretty mute. He keeps droning the same paeans over and over again, insinuating meaning rather than expressing it, and through his insistency irritating the hell not just out of Joe, but out of us. Director Roger Michell wants us to feel complicit: handheld cameras hover just behind doorways as if to implicate us as voyeurs. But it doesn't really work: bring on the bunny boiler, we keep thinking.
Yet Enduring Love is easy to endure. Michell has worked with Craig and Ifans before, in The Mother and Notting Hill respectively, and he draws rich, forceful performances from both of them. In a mirror of their characters' growing complicity, their initially contrasting body languages seem to merge: Joe's toned and muscled self-possession gives way to flapping chaos, while Jed moves from scrawny loser to brooding menace.
Morton emits her habitual indolence: even when she's standing up to sculpt her (not very good) pieces, she looks as if she's curled up on the floor, giggling in private reverie. It's not easy to believe that her relationship with Joe is so tough that it could withstand his descent into self-lacerating depression; she'd clearly prefer to be on her own munching a Twix. More impressive by far is Helen McCrory as the wife of the GP who died. Her grief has a clenched viscerality that stands out against the more cerebral emotions evident elsewhere in the film.
Like The Mother, Enduring Love is also striking for its almost European portrayal of middle-class manners. The main characters, including those played by Bill Nighy and Susan Lynch, live in delightful light-bathed London homes decorated with Polly Borland prints and amply stocked with fine wines. They buy fiction at the London Review of Books bookshop and check out contemporary art at the Tate. Unusually for a British film, this does not make them bad people.
The photography of Haris Zambarloukos is superb, and the score, by Jeremy Sams, has a looping pastoralism, at once expansive and troubled, that on occasion recalls the work of the great British film composer John Cameron. It also captures something of the essence of this clammy, devotional, unsettling film.
