POSTHOC RATING:  *** ½

The End of the Affair: Romantic drama.  Starring Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, Stephen Rea and Ian Hart.  Music by Michael Nyman. Cinematography by Roger Pratt. Screenplay by Neil Jordan from a Graham Greene novel. Directed by Neil Jordan.  Rated R. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

The End of the Affair is a sad and steamy film, about passion licit and illicit. Passion gained, lost, regained and then finally lost for good. Adapted from The Third Man author Graham Greene’s 1951 novel, it’s also a film about faith, a subject that moviemakers, unfortunately but understandably, shy away from.  Unfortunate, because, like it or not, faith remains a major part of so many millions of lives. Understandable, because of the extreme difficulty of putting that kind of material on film with either generating pointless controversy from touchy people or smirks and giggles from skeptics. 

But The End of the Affair  is also full of eccentrically lyrical moments and gestures that are part of The Crying Game director Neil Jordan’s approach to filmmaking. For those with both a literate and romantic frame of mind, it’s a fine evening at the movies.

The film is set in London from just before World War II to just after.  Ralph Fiennes plays Maurice Bendrix, a semi-successful writer living in London, who, meets and falls in love with Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), the wife of the extremely dull and self-effacing bureaucrat Henry Miles (Stephen Rea).  It’s a passionate torrid romance weighed down by Bendrix’s jealousy about everything around and about Sarah right down to the rain that drenches her skin and the stockings she wears. The romance consumes them to the exclusion of all else, even the Battle of Britain raging between the British and the Germans overhead. Between them they create a bubble world that keeps the world at war away.

During one of their secret trysts at Bendrix’s flat, a German bombing raid nearly kills Bendrix and Sarah abruptly and mysteriously breaks the romance off for good.  When the film starts it’s after the war.  Bendrix, still bereft, meets Henry Miles on a rainy street one night.  It has finally occurred to this kindly but obtuse man after so many years that his Sarah may not have been as loyal to him as he supposed. 

But who is this third man?  And why did Sarah leave Bendrix, still jealous and full of rage after all these years, wonders.  At Miles’ unwitting instigation, Bendrix hires  a detective agency whose main operative Mr. Parkis (Ian Hart) sets about following Sarah (and amusingly, Bendrix, who has contacted Sarah again, hoping to reunite with her).

We have a mystery at work here, albeit an unusual and surprising one especially to those who haven’t read Greene’s novel (which I haven’t). The film opens with Bendrix typing out “This is a diary of hate.” but of whom?  Who is the mysterious other man that both he and Henry are so jealous of?  The revelation takes the story beyond something more than a soap opera of illicit love into the arena of faith.  

Movies about love and faith are so rare these days, as to almost be radical when they do show up and with the recent release of Dogma this seems to be the year for it. (Must be that millennial fever).   If it wasn’t for Neil Jordan’s excellent script and lyrical direction, the whole movie might have become a risible anachronism, exciting nothing but bursts of laughter (a few people did giggle at the screening, but only a few). It is, in its classical romantic aspects, an old fashioned film, ala David Lean’s 1948 Brief Encounter, but the film’s graceful stylistics are well married to the actors enthusiasm and respect for the material.

I didn’t care at all for Ralph Fiennes’ dyspeptic adventurer in The English Patient, but here his brooding countenance is better suited for the troubled, frustrated Bendrix.  Instead of becoming annoying, his jealousy seemed appropriate to his identity.  After all, even the most even-tempered writer has at least some degree of dangerous, overwhelming obsession.  He is a lonely man with a suit of armor that is always fragile.  Fragile because the writer is also someone who, as Bendrix points out, notices everything. Bendrix’s armor is transparent and vulnerable. We can see why Sarah would be both attracted and infuriated by him.

As for Julianne Moore, she is one the great actresses in the movies right now, but with Sarah she comes up a bit short, as her English accent tends to fade in and out. Her final fate is obviously telegraphed by the script, a shortcoming probably no actor could overcome (at one point the theme from Love Story made a mercifully brief appearance in my skull. Luckily, Michael Nyman’s fine score kept it at bay). In the end, the matter is handled with a poignant grace  apparently absent from Greene’s novel according to director Jordan who spoke to the audience after the screening. 

The standout performance comes from Stephen Rea as the dull and dutiful Henry Miles.  Henry might have come off as a flat figure of fun, one of Monty Python’s bowler-hatted twits, but Rea reaches down inside and brings up his innate decency.  Rea portrays Henry as a quintessential Englishman truly involved and proud of his work as functionary, but completely out of touch with his wife’s fiery passion. He wears his bowler with complete natural ease. When he puts it on after sitting alone and hatless in the rain, we sigh for him, because we know he now knows what a fool he has been and we can see his heart sinking with the knowledge. His hat becomes his last shield of dignity.  His growing relationship with Bendrix becomes the most touching element of the film. 

The End of the Affair also contains one or two interesting echoes of one of Greene’s most famous works, his screenplay for The Third Man.  Both are mysteries concerning a mysterious Other. Ian Hart’s Mr. Parkis, a dogged, surprisingly naïve and fussy man is reminiscent of Bernard Lee’s doltish but decent Sergeant in the earlier film.  Hart is excellent as Parkis.  He also played John Lennon in both Backbeat and The Hours and the Times and here he’s absolutely unrecognizable. Funny and charming, Parkis is, like many private detectives, somewhat sinister, but Hart also makes Parkis a charmingly doltish man, a bizarre kind of innocent who’s unable to tail a suspect without getting caught and fussily uses “intimacy” as a substitute word for “sex”.   He’s like a child trapped inside a detective’s body and knows it.  It’s he who reveals the small miracle at the end, a sweet final touch to this small miracle of a movie.