The End of the Affair
by Shari L. Rosenblum

Even were I not already familiar with the "message" of Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair (based on the novel by Graham Greene), once presented with Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore)'s husband, a spineless castrato-empath (Stephen Rea, excellent as Henry Miles), and her lover, the sulkily obsessive emobodiment of a jealous whine (Ralph Fiennes as Maurice Bendrix), I'd have found it immediately and painfully apparent. The woman would have to be a saint to put up with either one of them.

Truth is, the film's deliberate, ponderous, plodding/plotting makes its obviousness inescapable even for those whose tolerance for intolerable characters is greater than mine. Every turning point (e.g., a fated meeting between husband and lover on a rainy night), every twist (e.g., spied upon lovers exposed as doctor and priest), every scene replayed a second time in the light of "revelation" is made heavy with the weight of cliche.

It's a simple story really. In war-torn England, under siege by evil forces, a woman left incomplete by her marriage to a pragmatist - a bureaucrat - fills the emptiness by taking up with a man of risk, a writer. Their illicit lovemaking is marked by bombs bursting in air, her moans of pleasure coterminous with the sirens blaring warning outside. One afternoon, God enters. A blast breaks through the stained-glass window in their trysting place and knocks the lover out . . . and down. His lack of consciousness awakens her conscience. Throwing off the blinders of her Father's Jewish tradition, she sees the light of her Mother's Christian truth (cf. the Gospel of St. John, Aquinas, Pascal's Pensees). She trades her heartbeat for his breath, renouncing the sins of the flesh for the promise of the spirit. God answers with his blessing. But it is not enough. Peace upon them, two years later, her lover happens back into her life. While she visits a priest and bestows her goodness with a kiss upon the cheek of an afflicted child, he imagines her husband or some other mortal his rival for her affections. Blinded still in his godless darkness, he fails to see God in his loved one's grace. He fails until, like good film martyrs everywhere, she dies from fictiondom's interminably indiscriminate cough at the precise moment that he articulates his refusal of the Almighty, and gives her life to save his soul. Her funeral peaks with the appearance of the child, healed. The man of risk, still angry, goes home and puts in writing that though he wants no part of Him, God cannot be denied. Halleleujah. Amen.

It makes paint-by-number canvasses look unpredictable in comparison.

Formula is forgivable, they tell me, in the service of something deep and abiding.

Like a morality play? For some, no doubt, the familiar and the foretellable is comfort and confirmation. Me, I like my preaching straight up or not at all, preferably the latter. And I rarely warm to dogma that builds on the self-satisfied denigration of other faiths.

Like a romantic tale (they tell me that's what this is)? I say if this is a romantic tale, God please save us from romance. Or better yet, keep God out of it, if putting him in must make of human bonding the grasping joyless thing that Jordan's made it here.

It is a fine religious moment in which the love of God supplants all things base and human - but it is not a romantic one. Romance is about love here on earth. It can be dark and it can be sunny - brooding or rosey - but it is flesh and it is real. To find romance in The End of the Affair, one must believe that it is enough to simply film a man and woman together in bed. But no. Romance is what celebrates what the man and woman have between them. In The End of the Affair, there is no celebration.

No human love is blessed in Jordan's moody piece. The film's one ordained love - the marriage between Henry and Sarah - is loveless and cold, the husband a poor lover who after years of connubiality would not know the sound of a woman's orgasm, the wife a remorseful cheat. And they are not alone. By the account of the film's projected onlooker (Ian Hart, perfect as always, as the private investigator hired to follow Sarah), marriage is a faithless business. Adulterous love fares no better.

There is no sign of love as human warmth in Bendrix, to whom Fiennes brings the same milksoppy pusillanimity that he brings to all his roles, whether he's deceiving the American public (Quiz Show), betraying the Allies (The English Patient), killing Jews (Schindler's List), or, as here, kicking his feet (sedately) in a possessive tantrum. And there is none in Sarah, whose luminescent indulgences seem more reflective of saintly endurance trials than of love's fires. There is not a microsecond between them that conveys the joy of loving, no instant when you get the sense of perfect communion between two people, no glow of trust, no intake of breath at the glory of it, no palpitation of desire. Even their lust is unconvincing. There is no point at which you could close your eyes - or would - and wish yourself one of them.

Human love is painted here as all needs and demands, selfishness and sniveling, suffocation and deceit, resentment and resignation. It is portrayed as something that, for all the film's pretenses, poses no real competition to the love for God - something that no man or woman thinking right could ever really choose. Fair enough, I concede, perhaps that is what it is; I don't know. But I know there is no romance in showing it so.

Neil Jordan knows how to set a tone - and he does set one here - but his story cannot sustain it. Obvious, dogmatic and anti-romantic - I'd think less of myself if I felt better about it.