The End of the Affair
Alleva, Richard
r GRAHAM GREENE LITE The End of the Affair ...~. aurice Bendrix, the hero of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, is one of modern literature's great soreheads. This London novelist is so...
...There is an ambiguity in the final scenes of the movie that not only Greene never intended but that Jordan himself probably doesn't want...
...But it turns out that Sarah's latest "lover" is God, who apparently resurrected Bendrix during an air raid after Sarah promised to renounce the romance...
...It is hard to live up to pop culture...
...REV...
...Christopher thinks of himself as a latter-day Corleone (or is it A1 Pacino...
...In one hypermundane exchange from the first season, for example, Tony's fretful wife Carmela (Edie Falco) commented on their school-age son, Anthony, Jr...
...he only wants to pluck a few heartstrings...
...Study in Vermont Commonweal | 9 January28, 2000 and snorts in contempt once or twice...
...Abandoning his art and unable to respond to other women, Bendrix becomes obsessed with the desire to hurt Sarah and wreck her marriage to the dull but needy Henry...
...PATRICK COLLINS, PH.D...
...Sarah has to have the soignd manner Moore gives her so that it may be shattered by the love affair and its aftermath...
...In the book, her self-neglect leading to pneumonia seems the sort of unconscious suicide that a lot of saints have committed...
...Is God a leg breaker for his own collection agency...
...Whatever the moral and theological implications of this, it is a dramatic, artistic mistake...
...Stephen Rea triumphs by portraying Henry as an overgrown schoolboy, the sort who has tea with the headmaster's wife and wins all the prizes...
...The Hound of Heaven has caught up with this nonbeliever...
...And, as the hapless detective Parkis, Ian Hart delights with a just blending of prurience, sweetness, and tweedy respectability...
...Jordan's face darkens, he shrugs his shoulders SAINT ..MI....C...
...Occasionally, Jordan even improves on Greene...
...Finally, he throws the book to the carpet, shakes his fist at the heavens, and calls out to whatever cloud Graham Greene is floating on: "Will you quit with all that conscience stuff...
...GRADUATE THEOLOGY AND PASTORAL MINISTRY Celebrate 40 years of Graduate Theology Programs on our campus this summer...
...How do you compete with a rival in whose existence you don't believe...
...Notice that Bendrix, a careful man with words, capitalizes the pronoun...
...Join us for either one-week, two-week, and~or three-week courses or combine your studies to coincide with our Reunion 2000 activitiesf This summer...
...But the film, so true to the novel for most of its length, finally dissolves Graham Greene's central premise and relieves Sarah of her theological dilemma...
...the only trouble is the manner does not get shattered enough...
...WILFRID HARRINGTON, P.O., S.T.D...
...Sarah is kin to Jean Anouilh's Becket, a worldly crea~tre who s~mbles on transcendence but, once awakened, clings to her divine lover even as her heart yearns for the earthly one...
...This metacultural motif reverberates particularly in the subplots involving Christopher (Michael Imperioli), the impetuous young gangster-in-waiting who is desperate to be officially "made...
...Nonsense...
...LUCIEN RICHARD, O.M.I., PH.D...
...I was touched but couldn't help seeing that this made Sarah's promise over Bendrix's (seeming) corpse nothing but a temporary stumbling block to the affair and not, as Greene intended, a transformation of it into a crucible...
...The legacy of their flesh-and-blood forebears can be just as much of a downer for the Soprano gang...
...CATHERINE NERNEY, SSJ, PH.D...
...RICHARD GULA, SS, PH.D...
...If you're a fan of Brief Encounter, you'll love this aspect of Affair with its cozy and squalid tea shops and its endless rain, with its lovers kissing under the shelter of raincoats held overhead, with its drizzle-making patterns on window panes, with its showdown of lover and husband rubbing verbal salt into each other's wounds while sharing an umbrella on a park bench during yet another downpour...
...Upon Julianne Moore's first entrance I thought, "Oh no...
...And when this Iago-with-a-conscience comes to the end of his tether, Fiennes knows how to awaken the audience's sympathy as well...
...But Neil Jordan's Sarah is just another sensual, good-natured person----one of us, glamorized...
...I'm too tired and old to learn to love...
...In an early session with his phlegmatic therapist, Dr...
...But this film offers plenty of pleasure before that ultimate failure sets in...
...The adult Henry may have continued winning those prizes (he is promised a knighthood for his government service) but has probably turned Sarah into a headmaster's wife, not a recipe for a successful marriage to a passionate woman...
...By the time Sarah dies, Bendrix has become a better and a worse man: He's learned compassion for humanity in general and for Henry in particular, but he's also emotionally depleted and can only pray, at the story's close, to a deity in whom he now tentatively believes but certainly does not love, "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough...
...This is exactly what happened in the Hollywood version of Madame Bovary...
...Academy Awards, here we come...
...Within ten minutes I realized what Moore was trying to do...
...Metaphor on this level may sound more suited to the poetry of William Wordsworth than to a show on premium cable, but anyone who hasn't yet encountered "The Sopranos" should rest assured that the series stays down-toearth even when it gets mythic...
...REV...
...REV...
...Too many walks in the rain...
...Standards are crumbling...
...This Emmy-winning series has a lot going for it--keen characterizations, an offbeat narrative rhythm, a droll sense of irony--but what really gives it a distinctive flavor is its atmosphere of subtle nostalgia...
...The film cuts this scene but retains the one where Bendrix takes Sarah to a bad movie made from a book of his that she's never read, but she is able to separate the Bendrix wheat from the moviemakers' chaff...
...Having achieved cinematic flow, convincing characterizations, and wonderful atmosphere, Neil Jordan then proceeds to cut the heart out of his movie in its last twenty-five minutes by having Sarah renege on her promise to God...
...Neil Jordan, who has brought Greene's novel to the screen, is much less ruthless than that divine dog...
...Again and again, I was gratified by how much of the book's humor Jordan retained, such as the delicious moment when the detective Parkis, who makes his entire living tailing adulterers while cherishing his own middle-class respectability, learns that the name he gave his son, Lancelot, isn't that of the knight who found the Holy Grail, as Parkis thought, but the knight discovered in Guinevere's bed...
...Perhaps Columbia Pictures was willing to finance it because, in outline, it sounds like Son of the English Patient...
...This is precisely what gives the novel its cruel, creepy strength...
...And torn out his heart...
...in fact, his life is so metaliterary that he is writing a screenplay about mobsters---write about what you know, right...
...This seeming or actual miracle has ignited Sarah's latent spirituality and, even as her own physique deteriorates from pneumonia, she starts to display a saint's ability to heal others...
...He thumbs through the first two-thirds, smiling at the rich characterizations, humane wit, and poignant eroticism, all of which he will turn to good cinematic account...
...Of course, he and his fellow gangsters know that the great days of organized crime have passed them by, but their malaise is on some level more general-a bona fide freefloating angst, all the more distressing for being vague...
...E istfulness is probably not the first emotion you'd associate with the Mafia, unless, that is, you've been watching "The Sopranos," the smoothly crafted crime-and-family drama that sailed into its second season on HBO this month...
...RICHARD FRAGOMENI, PH.D...
...Where's my arc...
...That miracle is in the movie, but there it seems nothing but a certification of a nice woman's niceness...
...REV...
...This London novelist is so swept up by his wartime love affair with Sarah Miles, the wife of a government bureaucrat, that her sudden and unexplained termination of the romance devastates him...
...The way his voice always hitches at the word "intimacy" is perfect...
...This performance is too placid...
...Life has proved to be something of a disappointment for the show's protagonist, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), an amiable suburban homeowner who just happens to be the leader of a New Jersey mob clan...
...To wit: Why does Sarah die in the end...
...when they flew away, they became vague symbols for departed innocence and honesty, a defunct code of honor, childhood, nature before the Fall...
...MICHAEL DRUMM, S.T.D...
...When he is not coordinating thugs and hitmen, Tony Soprano has to drive his daughter to visit colleges and worry about his aging mother (one arch shot in an early episode showed him reading a manual on elder care in the strip joint he and his "colleagues" use as headquarters...
...The most sweeping cut, an entire subplot about an atheistic propagandist, eliminates a great deal of inadvertent smugness...
...It says in the scriptwriting book that every character has an arc," he fumed at one point...
...Jordan dumps all this and opts instead for simple domestic pathos as husband and lover unite to nurse the dying woman they both love, later becoming a sort of poignant "odd couple" after her death...
...Or does God kill her because she didn't make good on her promise to him...
...Leave me alone forever...
...griped a Commonweal 2 0 January28, 2000...
...Commonweal | 8 January28,2000 Jordan and his cinematographer, Roger Pratt, splendidly realized the peculiar romance of damp, war-rationed London...
...If its performer were to render Henry as dull as Greene indicates, the audience would be unable to stand him, but a too sympathetic account would make the adulterous couple insupportable...
...Jordan's script cuts or combines plenty of incidents from the novel but, at least for the first three-quarters of the story, this is done not to defang the material but to give it dramatic vivacity and momentum...
...Now that's the way to get to a writer's heart...
...In a key scene of On the Waterfront, Marlon Brando furiously rounds on Eva Marie Saint for trying to get him to reform: "Will you quit with all that conscience stuff...
...She's too wrapped up in her own beauty and elegance to reach the humanity of Sarah...
...HBO's The Sopranos...
...No writer ever, ever gets tired of praise...
...The Sopranos' frequently banal existence contrasts strongly with Hollywoodcaliber Mafia legend, a fact that is not lost on the characters themselves...
...In fact, this movie is better than The English Patient, richer in atmosphere, humor, characterization, and sheer storytelling...
...In addition to strewing around such well-observed lines, the scriptwriters often opt for anticlimax as a plot technique: When Carmela and her lonely friend the local priest (Paul Schulze) fell into temptation, alone in her house late at night, for example, they resisted...
...I have a notion of Neil Jordan pacing the floor of his study with a copy of The End of the Affair in hand...
...Then he gets to the last chapters and all is suddenly not well...
...The slightly deflated feeling at the end of such an episode makes the show seem more like real life...
...Consumption...
...JANET FOY REV...
...MERCEDES IANNONE Contact us: www.smcvt.edu/gradprograms Email: gradprograms/smcvt.edu Phone: (802) 654-2579 Fax: (802) 654-2664 DR...
...She resumes the affair, which is finally ended only by her death...
...And without that dilemma, the story ultimately doesn't make sense, and so it can't be said that the movie even stands on its own merits...
...Eyes newly opened to the family business, Anthony, Jr., confronted his father with the remark, "It's just like in Godfather I!" as the pair head to the orthodontist...
...Even the love scenes are better: steamier yet also more tender...
...Our world-renowned faculty includes: REV...
...One instance: The book's Sarah first attracts the hero because she's read his novels and doesn't gush over them...
...Ralph Fiennes, adultery, World War II, British accents, and one hundred and ten minutes of guilty sex and emotional misery...
...Right after World War II, Henry's divulgence that his wife may be having a second affair elates Bendrix because it finally provides both the reason for her withdrawal and a chance to enact his spite...
...But the movie's Sarah dies of...well, I don't know what the hell she dies of...
...Ralph Fiennes, with his elegantly nasal voice and icy manner, can't but capture Bendrix's cultivated unlikability--his contempt for himself overflowing into contempt for others--but he also understands how such men can use the appeal of the handsome emotional cripple to awaken the sympathy of women...
...Conference of the Suits: "Okay, what have we got here...
...The miracle Sarah performs in the book is a certification of her holiness...
...RICHARD HARDY REV...
...LESLIE HOPPE, OFM, PH.D...
...The force of Sarah's character, her fate (and that of the two men in her life), and the central irony and piteousness of the story, all flow from Sarah's determination to keep her promise...
...The story's piquancy, after all, depends on the fact that, though they move in criminal circles, the characters are just folks, like you or me...
...Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), Tony struggled to define his melancholy, which he had associated with a flock of wild ducks that had setfled briefly in his backyard swimming pool...
...Shrewd writing allows the program to get good mileage out of this concept...
...Values today...
...Robert Iler), who may have attention deficit disorder, "You never noticed how he picks at the tongue of his tennis shoe...
...The atheistic Bendrix is completely discombobulated...
...The part of the husband is a trap for actors...
Vol. 127 • January 2000 • No. 2
