2005-03-09

Prior to reading Atonement, my experience with author Ian McEwan was limited to a rather disastrous date involving a screening of The Cement Garden, based on McEwan�s novel of the same name. For those of you who have never seen The Cement Garden, it is about a brother and sister who bury their dead parents in the cellar and then have an incestuous relationship. Great date movie!

So it was with trepidation that I started to read Atonement. However, it soon turned out to be one of the best books I�d read in months. I�m usually a little too ADD to enjoy novels with a lot of description (how I made it through a literature degree I�ll never know), but McEwan�s ability to create anticipation left me devouring long pages of description. He takes over one hundred pages to describe the events of a single afternoon, subtly building tension despite the fact that foreshadowing pretty much tells us what�s going to happen. It�s not so much that we wonder what�s going to happen as much as when and how it�s going to happen.

So what does this have to do with Enduring Love? Well, like The Cement Garden, Enduring Love is based on an eponymous Ian McEwan novel. And, like Atonement, the storyline creates anticipation and tension as we wait for the inevitable moment of climax.

Enduring Love opens with an incredible shot of a hot air balloon incident. I�ll let you find out what happens, as it�s really quite a spectacular thing to watch. This is a good time to mention the cinematography, which, combined with Roger Michell�s direction, serves to show us a nice balance between open countrysides�symbolizing healthy love�and claustrophobic spaces, which symbolize unhealthy obsession. Through this hot air balloon incident, our protagonist, Joe (Daniel Craig), a psychology professor at Oxford, meets a strange man named Jed (Rhys Ifans, best known for playing Hugh Grant�s dotty Welsh roommate in Notting Hill). For some reason known only to himself, Jed forms a strong, inexplicable attachment to Joe after the accident, and the rest of the film is about Joe�s efforts to understand the nature of both Jed�s obsession and his own obsession with the hot air balloon and its aftermath.

Ifans is a nice balance between pathetic and increasingly sinister. If you�ve only seen him play the good-natured buffoon in Notting Hill,you�ll be pleasantly surprised at his excellent portrayal of a disturbed man in this film. Craig, who is also very good, plays Joe like a closed-up, tightly-wound, pinched academic who talks about the nature of love in his lectures but somehow cannot connect this to his own relationship with his girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton), who is at first concerned and then fed up with Joe�s response to Jed. In general, all the actors are excellent, including the ones in smaller supporting roles like Susan Lynch and Bill Nighy as a couple who are friends with Claire and Joe. (I love Bill Nighy�the first thing I ever saw him in was Love Actually, in which he was a little over the top, but in Enduring Love he is subtle and compelling for the short time he is onscreen.)

Again, as in Atonement, we have a good idea of what the characters are going to do long before they do it, but McEwan is more interested in showing us what happens along the way. Like The Cement Garden, I really don�t recommend this as a date movie, but it�s a fascinating look at the nature of obsession and love nonetheless.

Posted by polarcanuck at 1:36 p.m.

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