Enduring Creepiness
There is something important to know about Enduring Love that is not apparent from its title: It’s a thriller. More specifically, it’s a creepy, twisted, overproduced (but often intelligent) psychological thriller (adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel) with an ending all too loyal to the genre. Director Roger Michell (most recently of The Mother, a nearly perfect family drama) withholds this information until the last possible moment, so that the sudden burst of violence is, true to the root of that word, a violation. But the result is unfairly disturbing.
A closer look at the title reveals something amiss. For as the Bush administration discovered with its invasion of Iraq, “Operation Enduring Freedom,” to endure is not merely to last but to undergo, to suffer. (The Latin root means to make hard.) In fact, the movie begins in suffering, lingers in suffering and ends in still greater suffering. The protagonist endures it all and is not hardened but softened, renewed — but only after the viewer may have turned against him or the movie or both.
The film opens in a vision of Arcadia, a pastoral setting of luscious green hills. Joe (the craggily beautiful Daniel Craig) has taken girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton) out for a picnic. But before the two can pop the cork on the champagne, a hot-air balloon skitters across the field, attempting to land. A boy is trapped inside. Joe runs to help, as do several other men. The men grasp the basket and pull it to the ground, but a gust of wind sends the balloon back into the air, and as it ascends, they must let go to survive. One of them doesn’t, and he falls to a messy death.
Joe is haunted by the event to the point of obsession, and the film reflects his narrowing of vision. He can’t stop believing that if all the men had held on, they could have brought down the balloon. Then, as if his own trauma were not enough, it’s compounded by the arrival of Jed (Rhys Ifans).
Jed is scraggly, with drippy eyes and the softness of the deeply religious (or the criminally insane). He, too, was in the field that day; after he and Joe found the mangled body of the dead man, Jed invited Joe to pray. Jed believes that he and Joe shared an experience worth talking about, and he isn’t willing to let it go, though Joe has no interest.
The movie benefits from the presence of Morton, morose and raccoon-eyed with makeup, as a feeling woman whose initial attempts to support her unraveling partner only widen the rift between them. The dialogue between the two is clipped and smart; they are real, interesting characters (she more than he).
But Michell’s impulse to surprise feels punishing, as though we’re being taught a bitter lesson. The result is creepy and unpleasant. There is hope, however bleak, at the end — an Ian McEwan kind of hope in which nearly everything has been lost anyway — but mostly there’s a sense of unnecessary devastation. No thanks.
