In Michell's last film, The Mother, Craig played a carpenter whose handiwork extended to carnally ministering to a sexagenarian widow. With his lean, sinewy body and restless physicality, Craig fit the role so beautifully you could almost believe the melodrama in which he was mired.
He's rather less persuasive as a man committed to the life of the mind; he doesn't look remotely professorial, and the character's classroom antics don't help matters. Still, the casting and the characterization turn out to be less problematic than they initially seem because Penhall's screenplay is heavier on action than thought and because Michell keeps things moving fast enough so that it takes a while to grasp that this is essentially Fatal Attraction with posh accents and no boiled bunny.
That doesn't make the film or the work of its very fine ensemble any less enjoyable. The story's literary pedigree and its trappings, the arty-intellectual milieu, the seemingly knowledgeable chatter, all that red wine quaffed over candlelit dinners, suggest something more rarefied than what materializes on screen or, for that matter, in the novel. But Michell is a bona-fide entertainer, and he knows how to do Hollywood as well as any high-ticket Beverly Hills hire, as Changing Lanes proved (yet another diverting stalker movie trying to pretend it's something it's not). In Enduring Love, Michell whips the camera around too much and cuts into his scenes too quickly, but he pumps juice into this thin story and, together with his performers, keeps a movie going that might otherwise crash-land.
RSS