Adultery in and of itself does not necessarily make good drama. Sometimes, it can make good farce, I suppose, but as far as drama is concerned, the best way to handle a love triangle is to tell the story backwards. Neil Jordan's adaptation of The End of the Affair does, in some sense, attempt to tell the story sideways, and is occasionally interesting as a question of, `Where am I now in their idyllic past or the grim future?'
The opening credits of the film are quite reassuring. Neil Jordan has always been a superb craftsman, and very often a strong storyteller.
For the first ten minutes, I thought I was in for a treat. The camera drifts over the belongings of the protagonist, Bendix (Ralph Fiennes) and then settles in on him typing his novel. `This is a diary of hate,' he begins, and I smiled, knowing that he was going to be the laconic, smart but silly everyman akin to Joseph Cotton in `The Third Man', the Graham Greene protagonist, tough yet brittle, with a wise acre mouth but deep wells of insecurity underneath.
Fiennes and Moore flirt at a party, and talk about the characters in the book he is going to write. This seems to be the most interesting part of their relationship the attraction stage. Once they get into the affair, which is steamy and highly charged sexually, I promptly lost interest in the movie.
See, there's really not much interest in watching people who are having an affair on film. Perhaps the Graham Greene novel handled this in a poetic way (and the dialogue sounds very much like prose), but onscreen it plays itself out as a somewhat predictable romance which comes to its end. See, it turns into a love triangle between Fiennes, Moore and well the Holy Ghost. An incident which caused The End of the Affair brought about Moore's complex relationship with God.
This leads to the movie's major problem, which is that I never felt the "Presence of God" in this film as a character. `Breaking the Waves' had me convinced that God was a guiding force in Beth's life, and was always there. In this film, the miracles feel like plot points.
Perhaps God is underdeveloped as a character because Moore (though excellent) is really given a somewhat limited role. She remains in the background, in a way a mystery. Fiennes and Rea come through clearer as three dimensional characters. We are never really given insight into what Moore feels she's always being observed by someone else, be it Fiennes, the private detective he hires, or Jordan's camera. She seems to be a product of the Male Gaze. (Emily Watson was, too, but that was part of the point in `Breaking the Waves' and never flinched from the disturbing aspects of that.)
I spent a good deal of time squirming in my seat, fairly bored by the romance and the ramifications of this affair. However, there was a subplot which really worked. Ian Hart plays the befuddled and lovable detective who is trailing Moore, who strikes up a friendship with Fiennes. He's very by the books, but not a particularly good judge of character.He's smart enough to get it done though, and to realize that his son (who follows him everywhere in training) will be an even better detective than he is.
First of all, the father and son (a little kid) detective team is simply adorable and comic a welcome change from the heaviness of the rest of the story. The little kid gets our sympathy not for being a cute tyke but because he's a clever sot and a likable joe, like his old man. He has a huge purple birthmark on his face which he's sensitive about, but otherwise seems happy-go-lucky. He becomes perhaps the best, most moving thing about the movie, even though he disappears from most of the second half.
Interesting that the subplot manages to have more heart and soul than the central story, and even more winning is that this is where the movie finds its real miracle.
