Review: Enduring Love

From The Cement Garden to his brilliant Atonement, Ian McEwan picks at the wounds left by terrible events, linking death to desire in ways that both challenge the nature of art and illuminate the difficulties of modern living. Director Roger Michell understands the questions that McEwan raises about love in his novel Enduring Love, but not unlike his film The Mother, the director shoots the thing like a soulless spread for Modern Living.

The opening scene, an evocation of untainted bliss between a bestselling author, Joe (Daniel Craig), and his sculptor girlfriend, Claire (a wasted Samantha Morton), in an empty field, is a triumph. A hot air balloon hauntingly glides into frame and the life of a young boy literally dangles in the hands of a group of strangers. Then, a horrible death, which resigns Joe to a life of could-have-beens and should-have-happends, a ritual of grief that’s speciously amplified by cloying callbacks to the hot air balloon accident and further distorted when Jed (Rhys Ifans), who’s similarly linked to the death in the field, begins to stalk the author.

Is Jed attracted to to Joe? Is he a Jesus freak? Or is he just a crazed fan? Michell doesn’t seem to think it matters, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if he also didn’t strongly imply that Joe’s strange relationship to Jed may be a figment of the author’s metaphysical imagination. Which may explain why Claire weirdly doesn’t look out the window when Joe tells her that the creepy Jed is looking at their apartment from a park across the street.

There’s always some sort of class struggle coded into the misery of McEwan’s novels, but it’s not something that registers in this indecisive adaptation. Michell’s direction can only be described as bourgeois, and though his screenplay retains the pretense of McEwan’s theories on love, biology, and everything in between, the transplant is trite and messy.