When love hurts, pain is happiness

In the British film Enduring Love, the actor Rhys Ifans plays the part of the scorned lover with neurasthenic delicacy and a spidery creepiness. Lanky and loose-limbed, Ifans has fine flaxen hair that occasionally brushes into his eyes, a bit of peekaboo that in the role of Jed Parry, scorned lover and full-bore psychopath, the actor transforms into a gesture of unsettling coquetry. Jed loves Joe (Daniel Craig), who in turn loves Claire (Samantha Morton), who in the way of the world and tragic romances, mostly seems to love herself. Theirs is a roundelay of misunderstanding and bruising, modern disconnection.

Based on the novel by the English writer Ian McEwan and directed by Roger Michell, an Englishman who is probably best known for the grating romantic comedy Notting Hill and should be known more for the pulp thriller Changing Lanes, Enduring Love is a serious movie about love, principally its petty cruelties and monstrous disguises. Soft, tender love, the kind that wraps you in comfort and warmth, much less the kind that sends you over the moon, is almost nonexistent in this curious, lachrymose story. The film takes it as an article of faith that the only answer to pain isn't a gentle hand, but yet more pain, which Michell and the screenwriter Joe Penhall apply with much the same dedication Laurence Olivier brought to dentistry in Marathon Man.

The story opens in a brilliant green oasis on the outskirts of London where Joe and Claire have gone for a picnic. Just as Joe's about to pop the cork on a bottle of Champagne a red passenger balloon drifts near, its basket skipping across the ground. A man suddenly tumbles out and frantically tries to get at the terrified boy still in the basket. After a beat, the merest of hesitations, Joe races toward the balloon along with four others, each of whom has come running. Amid a flurry of rapid edits and blurred shouts, the five manage to steady the balloon. Then a strong wind swoops in low and carries the balloon up with the men hanging off the basket. Four drop to safety; one falls to his death.

The falling man is a terrible sight, and Michell makes the horror of the image frightfully potent. In the novel, Claire quotes Milton when she talks about the man's plunge. Watching this scene in the film, which Michell thankfully shows at a distance, I thought both of Icarus and the falling man I watched on television on Sept. 11.

The novel was published in 1997 and, to their credit, the filmmakers haven't tried to contemporize the story by giving it some unearned and ill-fitting political resonance. Yet for me what gave this story force, what carries it beyond McEwan's unremarkable meditations about the perils of the rational mind, is how Michell captures the grief and helpless rage of those who witness calamity about which they can do nothing.

The accident shakes Joe to the core. One of those university types who exist only in movies, one whose spouting about Darwin, biology and love is meant to be deep but sounds like the chemically enhanced ramblings of an undergraduate, he can't wrap his mind around the pointlessness of the disaster. He draws balloons on scraps of paper, stares, transfixed, at ovoid-shaped vases and red apples, repeatedly insisting that something could have been done. When Jed, who was one of the other men hanging off the balloon, calls, Joe responds with wary curiosity. He seems pulled to the idea of another witness, but there's something about Jed that leaves Joe uneasy. Maybe it's the way Jed knelt in prayer after the accident, or maybe it's just his softly insinuating voice with its notes of urgency and supplication.