"Enduring Love"

This peculiar film about a guy stalked by another guy asks that age-old question: Are psychotics who need people the luckiest people in the world?

By Charles Taylor

Oct 28, 2004 | After finishing Ian McEwan's novel "Enduring Love" I felt that the book surely couldn't be saying what it appeared to be saying, and yet I couldn't see any other possible interpretation. Having seen Roger Michell's film of the novel, I'm relieved that someone else shared my reading of the book, and appalled to have that reading confirmed.

"Enduring Love" is the looniest bit of special pleading for the deranged since Peter Shaffer's "Equus." In that play, a teenage boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike is held up by his impotent, disillusioned psychiatrist as an exemplar of passion in a passionless world. "Enduring Love" is about how a man who is incapable of love is made a better person when he's stalked by a psychotic.

That may not be at first apparent, perhaps because Michell sucks you right into the story. The opening of "Enduring Love" has the lucidity of a very bad dream. Joe (Daniel Craig), a university lecturer, takes his live-in girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton) on a picnic with the intent of asking her to marry him. It's a bright, cloudless day, the setting one of those impossibly green English fields. Suddenly, Claire is distracted from the question she can tell is coming by the sight of a hot-air balloon skimming the field. A young boy stands helplessly in the basket while his grandfather tries to stop it from ascending. The matter of factness with which Michell and his cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos shoot this sight gives it the quality of the truly surreal: It's concrete, undeniable, and yet you can't process it.

These moments before Joe acts to help the man and his grandson, a hesitation that feels like an eternity, are one of the most effective depictions of the intrusion of catastrophe into everyday life that I've ever seen in a movie. Other men in the field join in the rescue attempt and by a cruel twist, both grandson and grandfather are saved while one of the rescuers is killed.

The next scene, where Joe relates the ordeal over dinner to his friends Robin (the wonderful Bill Nighy) and Rachel (Susan Lynch), suggests that the movie is going to be about Joe's survivor's guilt (he believes he could have done more to prevent the disaster) and about how we are cut adrift by the sudden, absurd intrusion of death into the safety of our lives. Both the content and the rhythm of the conversation in this scene feels authentic. Robin, being honest but also trying to bolster his friend, says he himself would have been a gibbering idiot in those circumstances. But both Robin, with his admiration, and Joe, with his feelings of inadequacy, are buying into a myth of heroism, ignoring the plain truth that an unthinking competence takes over in many of us during moments of disaster. (That may help victims as well as rescuers, giving the former what assistance they need while allowing the latter to distance themselves from the horrific reality in front of them.)

But the movie is about something else altogether. Joe gets a call from one of his fellow rescuers, wanting to meet up with him. Jed (Rhys Ifans) is a gangling, scruffy fellow whose gentle voice and timid demeanor hide a frightening certainty and intimidating persistence. At first Joe believes Jed just needs someone to talk to about their shared trauma. But Jed starts pleading with Joe, challenging him to admit to what Jed sees as a shared moment of love between them. Rightfully believing Jed to be deranged, Joe begs off, but soon Jed is shadowing him, snapping his picture while he's browsing in a bookstore, turning up in his lectures, standing in the playground across from Joe's apartment in the middle of the night.

Next Page: What if Joe were a woman?

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