Enduring Love (2004)

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Memorable, crazy movie

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The bad thing is that he stayed in the attempt. It starts as a thing and goes the other way. The problem is that it does not catch you. She has too many shortcomings to be good.The casting is very badly done. Daniel Craig is especially bad. Samantha Morton, this woman is a good actress, but to me in this movie, she does not tell me anything. Rhys Ifans is pretty good, but I do not get caught either.It seems that to put a hairdresser and a makeup you have already made character, but something more is needed.How can you put a white photograph, without spotlights, to make a film of this type? It's that he does not put anything in the movie. It seems like a love movie all the time and it is not.The direction is bad, he does not realize that he is bored. It needs to give you more restlessness, more tension. He starts showing you things, but then he stays. He does not know how to narrate and less to compose.The bad thing is that he stayed in the attempt. It starts as a thing and goes the other way. The problem is that it does not catch you. She has too many shortcomings to be good.The casting is very badly done. Daniel Craig is especially bad. Samantha Morton, this woman is a good actress, but to me in this movie, she does not tell me anything. Rhys Ifans is pretty good, but I do not get caught either.It seems that to put a hairdresser and a makeup you have already made character, but something more is needed.How can you put a white photograph, without spotlights, to make a film of this type? It's that he does not put anything in the movie. It seems like a love movie all the time and it is not.The direction is bad, he does not realize that he is bored. It needs to give you more restlessness, more tension. He starts showing you things, but then he stays. He does not know how to narrate and less to compose.The sequences of the end, are not understood, incredible and some are left over.

On the brink of a marriage proposal as they picnic in a country meadow, a college professor and his girlfriend are blind-sided when an out-of-control hot air balloon drops from the sky with a terrified young boy in its basket. Strangers arrive from nowhere to grab hold of the tethering ropes, but a gust of wind lifts the balloon back into the air. Everybody lets go - except for one man who plunges to his death shortly afterward.From this melodramatic beginning, 'Enduring Love' quickly descends into an existentialist quagmire. The professor's romance begins to show signs of strain as he agonizes over his role in the accident, and one of the strangers from the field starts to stalk him. Characters converse in an artificially obscure manner, shout at one another and walk about in pouring rain to demonstrate their psychological conflict. An intrusive soundtrack, glib camera techniques and jumpy editing provide further irritation until another melodramatic episode resolves the issue with the stalker. Several years later, some of the characters return to the meadow to discuss how past events have affected their lives - while many viewers will be considering how a pretentious director and screenwriter have wasted 100 minutes of their time on such specious nonsense.

On form, Ian McEwan is the outstanding novelist of his generation. Unfortunately, Enduring Love is not one of his better works. The story could perhaps be made to work better on film, but this outing suggests not. The spectacular opening to the novel is faithfully captured here, when the main players quite literally drop into our lives. The other strong point of the novel is the suggestion that Jed may just be a figment of the protagonist's imagination, an intriguing plot device sadly not employed by the filmmakers. In the novel, the fact that Joe never calls the police hints at delusion on Joe's part; in the film, with Jed clearly all too real, the absence of any report to authority about Jed's stalking punctures our suspension of disbelief.Craig puts in another wide-ranging performance, while Morton, never less than awe-inspiring, is flawless. Rhys Ifans redeems himself for The Replacements with a genuinely unnerving performance. Who thought that soppy Welsh git from Notting Hill could be this scary? However, outstanding performances alone cannot redeem a less-than-compelling story. A two-hour film just does not allow the time and scope for the exploration of themes involving religion, psychology, biology and physics that McEwan dissects so well in his prose. In the film version of Enduring Love, there is something arid and stilted about all the clamour and confusion in the relationships. A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, to paraphrase the bard.De Clerambault is a fascinating, but obscure and rarely glimpsed syndrome. I read the novel when it came out, and remember thinking after reading the last page, 'So what?' In that sense, I suppose, the film is a faithful adaptation of the book.

Ian McEwan's novel 'Enduring Love' tells a complex story that touches on the nature of human relationships. But on reading it, I was also struck by how much like a thriller it seemed, with its plot centred on a character who undergoes an experience both frightening and unusual; in fact, so unusual that it isolates him from others and forces him to handle it alone, with an ever-increasing sense of paranoia. So it's not so surprising to see it now adapted as a movie. In fact, the central thriller is downplayed compared to the book and this is not necessarily a bad thing, as that part of the story is relatively one-dimensional (in the way that thrillers often are), whereas it's the hinterland of this tale that is more ambiguous and interesting. And the mood and themes of the novel, with its rationalist narrator, are ably reflected in the movie, with Daniel Craig excellent as a very un-Bondish protagonist.Director Roger Michell shows a generally sure touch, though in places the score is a little intrusive. While the compressed plot is a mixed blessing: the book, I thought, went on too long in the same vein; but equally, made a little more sense than the shortened version here. An element of playfulness present in the text has also failed to transfer to the screen. But it's still an intelligent rendition of a story that could easily have been butchered; and a modest success.