enduring love
Visited the film festival at last, and it’ll be over in two days, and lots of gatherers and atmosphere, the artsy crowd I still hanker for, and women… but I was with my erstwhile, as always, mea culpa but that was fine, we were there because her daughter had tickets, or a booking, and we almost couldn’t get in because we weren’t Catherine, but we managed, though due to unexpected lifts across town and labyrinthine carparks we missed the first ten minutes or so.
Enduring Love’s a Brit film based on the Ian McEwan novel, which it follows quite closely (McEwan was executive producer). Looking for a review of the book (I mean my review), I find I didn’t write one, though I recorded that I read the book in January 1999, quite a while ago now. I do remember a few qualms about the book, reinforced by the film, or at least brought back to my consciousness by it.
The first part of the book was particularly memorable, the description of the ballooning accident, the moral dilemmas involved, the guilt, as well as the description of the body – McEwan, for all that he has ‘reformed’ clearly relishes the macabre aspects of such a death. The resultant bizarre connection between the narrator and a disturbed young man who falls in love with him was also a theme I was able to take in my stride, more or less. What I couldn’t quite accept or fathom was the narrator’s way of dealing with the stalker, and the lack of effective communication about the matter between himself and his nearest and dearest. In the film, the central character has an intensity and obsessiveness, after the initial, calmer, scenes, which makes him hard to warm to, but of course this is the point, and it’s a point that the medium of film can make more effectively than the novel. The incident with the balloon has triggered some self-questioning, has raised some serious doubts in him which have the effect of cutting him off from others, rendering him more vulnerable than ever just when the stalker makes his appearance, at first sharpening his sense of guilt and failure.
Obviously this is essentially the narrator’s story, the narrator’s journey. The actor, whose name I can’t recall, has been chosen, clearly, because of his physical resemblance to McEwan himself (though I suspect a more flatteringly muscular version), which is an effective touch. Yet I can’t help but feel that the lover/assailant, who’s so clearly not right in the head, is treated appallingly. Wouldn’t common sense guide you towards jollying him along (within limits) while immediately seeking professional assistance? I seem to remember that in the book the police were called in but that they were singularly ineffectual. In the film there’s a scene in which, after waking his girlfriend up in the middle of the night with the results of his internet research into the stalker’s peculiar mental condition, he notices that the stalker is waiting across the road from his house, in a child’s playground, in the dark, in the rain. I found this scene a little contrived, rather in a Hardyesque sense. The girlfriend, worn out by his intensity of late, is unwilling to take in his information, or to confirm the sighting of the stalker. Mighty bad luck, but surely the stalker would be there on other nights, surely there would’ve been a wealth of opportunities to point him out to her? Apparently not, and this failure of communication has enormous consequences. My erstwhile is unconvinced by my concerns, and thinks that without these accidents, these missed communications, there’d be no drama would there, no film? She’s more willing to recognise that the failure here is a failure in the central character, his preoccupation with his ‘manliness’, his worries about being overly theoretical. These have cut him off from simple communication, rendered him half-mad himself, caught in the space between action and contemplation, a la Hamlet. I’m not quite convinced though, I feel that the bloody dénouement to this particular tragedy could’ve been more easily averted. Mundane, true, but I suspect more authentic.
Having said all that, the intensely claustrophobic nature of the story is brilliantly rendered cinematically, with close-ups, up-from-under-shots, jumpy and sometimes swimming hand-held stuff – I don’t know the technical terms. The scene in which he rushes home to find his wife entertaining the nutter is a classic example of technical variety to create overlays of panic and urgency. The performances too are solid and nuanced in typically Brit fashion. Might reread the novel now, to focus further on detail. Seem to recall that in the novel he was a science writer, with the ballooning experience leading him to hanker after real scientific activity as opposed to mere reportage. In the film he’s a lecturer, apparently on love. It was left vague, but used as a counterpoint of course. Not entirely effectively, because love isn’t really the object under investigation here. Love and madness, yes perhaps but only superficially. The nature of the nutter’s madness/love is never really questioned or considered. In the end, you could argue, blood and guts, homosexual unpleasantness and cheap drama win out. That’d be a harsh conclusion, but what we have here isn’t quite satisfactory, to my mind.
Enduring Love’s a Brit film based on the Ian McEwan novel, which it follows quite closely (McEwan was executive producer). Looking for a review of the book (I mean my review), I find I didn’t write one, though I recorded that I read the book in January 1999, quite a while ago now. I do remember a few qualms about the book, reinforced by the film, or at least brought back to my consciousness by it.
The first part of the book was particularly memorable, the description of the ballooning accident, the moral dilemmas involved, the guilt, as well as the description of the body – McEwan, for all that he has ‘reformed’ clearly relishes the macabre aspects of such a death. The resultant bizarre connection between the narrator and a disturbed young man who falls in love with him was also a theme I was able to take in my stride, more or less. What I couldn’t quite accept or fathom was the narrator’s way of dealing with the stalker, and the lack of effective communication about the matter between himself and his nearest and dearest. In the film, the central character has an intensity and obsessiveness, after the initial, calmer, scenes, which makes him hard to warm to, but of course this is the point, and it’s a point that the medium of film can make more effectively than the novel. The incident with the balloon has triggered some self-questioning, has raised some serious doubts in him which have the effect of cutting him off from others, rendering him more vulnerable than ever just when the stalker makes his appearance, at first sharpening his sense of guilt and failure.
Obviously this is essentially the narrator’s story, the narrator’s journey. The actor, whose name I can’t recall, has been chosen, clearly, because of his physical resemblance to McEwan himself (though I suspect a more flatteringly muscular version), which is an effective touch. Yet I can’t help but feel that the lover/assailant, who’s so clearly not right in the head, is treated appallingly. Wouldn’t common sense guide you towards jollying him along (within limits) while immediately seeking professional assistance? I seem to remember that in the book the police were called in but that they were singularly ineffectual. In the film there’s a scene in which, after waking his girlfriend up in the middle of the night with the results of his internet research into the stalker’s peculiar mental condition, he notices that the stalker is waiting across the road from his house, in a child’s playground, in the dark, in the rain. I found this scene a little contrived, rather in a Hardyesque sense. The girlfriend, worn out by his intensity of late, is unwilling to take in his information, or to confirm the sighting of the stalker. Mighty bad luck, but surely the stalker would be there on other nights, surely there would’ve been a wealth of opportunities to point him out to her? Apparently not, and this failure of communication has enormous consequences. My erstwhile is unconvinced by my concerns, and thinks that without these accidents, these missed communications, there’d be no drama would there, no film? She’s more willing to recognise that the failure here is a failure in the central character, his preoccupation with his ‘manliness’, his worries about being overly theoretical. These have cut him off from simple communication, rendered him half-mad himself, caught in the space between action and contemplation, a la Hamlet. I’m not quite convinced though, I feel that the bloody dénouement to this particular tragedy could’ve been more easily averted. Mundane, true, but I suspect more authentic.
Having said all that, the intensely claustrophobic nature of the story is brilliantly rendered cinematically, with close-ups, up-from-under-shots, jumpy and sometimes swimming hand-held stuff – I don’t know the technical terms. The scene in which he rushes home to find his wife entertaining the nutter is a classic example of technical variety to create overlays of panic and urgency. The performances too are solid and nuanced in typically Brit fashion. Might reread the novel now, to focus further on detail. Seem to recall that in the novel he was a science writer, with the ballooning experience leading him to hanker after real scientific activity as opposed to mere reportage. In the film he’s a lecturer, apparently on love. It was left vague, but used as a counterpoint of course. Not entirely effectively, because love isn’t really the object under investigation here. Love and madness, yes perhaps but only superficially. The nature of the nutter’s madness/love is never really questioned or considered. In the end, you could argue, blood and guts, homosexual unpleasantness and cheap drama win out. That’d be a harsh conclusion, but what we have here isn’t quite satisfactory, to my mind.
posted by Stewart at 7:38 pm
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