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Learn about our streaming media |
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There are many ways to support Chicago Public Radio. Learn how to support Chicago Public Radio |
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Nov 7, 2009 1:55 PM CST |
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The opening scene of Roger Michell’s new film, Enduring Love, is a harrowing image. It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. On a perfect summer day, a loving couple go out on a picnic. We know that Joe is about to propose to Claire. Nearby is a hot air balloon. It is an idyllic scene. A sudden gust of wind makes it take off, with a boy left alone in the basket. Four men, including Joe, rush to the rescue. They grasp at the ropes which had secured the balloon, but are born aloft. One by one they let go. The man who hangs on the longest eventually falls to the ground and is killed. Another of the men involved in the rescue, Jed, latches onto Joe and starts stalking him. He sees divine intervention in their being brought together. The plot gradually evolves into ever-more bizarre territory. Enduring Love is based on a novel by Ian McEwan. It is a thriller but it doesn’t try to deliver on the suspense front. Instead, McEwan and Michell choose to explore the interior territory of the murky subject of love and attachment. Enduring Love is especially notable for its impeccable acting. Daniel Craig plays Joe, the college professor who lectures about how love is scientifically meaningless. Samantha Morton plays Claire, his girlfriend who is a sculptor. Rhys Ifans is brilliantly creepy as Jed, the stalker who is obviously unbalanced and slowly going insane. The balloon accident is central to the film. It sparks the connection between Joe and Jed, and it begins the unraveling of Joe and Claire’s relationship. Jed, who is disheveled, with huge, glazed blue eyes, on the verge of tears—a kind of earnest zealot—is a dark angel. He suddenly appears in a park opposite Joe’s apartment window in the rain then at a bookstore. At first, he just wants to talk. The two share a terrifying experience and they are both survivors, with survivors’ guilt. A trauma brought them together. But we soon realize there is something much more demented and sinister at work. Jed’s obsession with Joe has a sexual element to it. Its intensity is downright creepy. Jed is overly adoring, thoughtful, needful, constantly expressive of his love for Joe. He badgers Joe with, “You can’t live your life in denial....I think you know me better than you think....Everything means something....” The point of this obsessive intensity for us is that it makes us uncomfortable. It is unsettling. There is something else to it than what Joe professes in his classes: love is not, purely, scientifically, biological. It has a psychic—or psychopathic—dimension. Enduring Love concludes with a more traditional, thriller-style sequence. Some who see the film criticize this as being out of character, as being artificial. But regardless of the perhaps over-constructed ending, the virtues of Enduring Love as a film are in the process that gets us there—in the contrasts and contradictions of the bizarre interior universe that the film and the novel reveal. The film probes the nature of love and attachment. What is it? What creates it? What makes it so powerful? What unmakes it? What is its power? Where are the weaknesses? What makes it collapse? Where are the fissures or cracks that develop along the way? Why is it capable of destroying us? There are no easy answers to these questions. Philosophers, psychologists, and everyone who has ever been in love or out of it has confronted them. What Enduring Love does best is to convincingly set these questions in the context of extreme situations. Here we come intensely, intimately, and viscerally face to face with it. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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