Most of Graham Greene’s novels have been filmed – not always successfully. In The End of the Affair, now made into an excellent movie by Neil Jordan, novelist Maurice Bendrix sits in a cinema, watching a movie he scripted and muttering, “That’s not what I wrote!” Jordan includes the scene in his film (which he also scripted), almost asking one to compare it to its source.
The best Greene movies are either the ones he wrote as film scripts in the first place (such as The Third Man), or adapted himself (Our Man in Havana). He worked for a time as a film critic, famously getting sued for noting the sly seductiveness displayed by the ostensibly sexless Shirley Temple; that close critical attention as well as his later scripting work lent a certain cinematic quality to his novels.
One forgets, though, until one re-reads a novel like The End of the Affair, how much Greene makes of the internal processes of his characters’ minds, let alone the knotty webs of religious belief (or unbelief) they weave around themselves. This is particularly true of The End of the Affair, which is not one of Greene’s novels of action set in an exotic clime, so it is inevitable that Jordan has played up the sexual elements of the story and cut down the theological ramifications of the novel’s bargain with God. That is possibly also a concession to modern sensibilities – sex has become a kind of religion in its own right. (The British censors, however, restricted The End of the Affair to over-18s, apparently on the basis of a shot of Ralph Fiennes’s “pumping buttocks”. So they’re not believers, then.)
The novel, over which Greene struggled and had deep misgivings, was the first in which he used a first-person narrator and the only one in which the protagonist is a novelist. The odd name Bendrix may be a reference to the period Greene spent writing furiously on benzedrine; that there is an autobiographical element here is indubitable. The recent revelations about Greene’s long and often tortuous relationship with a married woman, Catherine Walston, indicate as much.
That affair, however, continued for decades after Greene had written the book. Maybe his writing about a break-up allowed him to continue the relationship with Walston, but what is most noticeably transmitted, in both book and film, is the intensity of the liaison and his feelings about it.
Fiennes is perhaps a bit too young and smooth-faced to play a character written as a middle-aged man desperate at the thought that his last chance at love has been ripped from him. Yet he expertly captures the writer’s bitter bewilderment at the sudden end of his affair with Sarah (Julianne Moore), as well as his duplicity and coldly ironic wit. He is a spy in the house of love.
The American Moore, playing an Englishwoman for the second time (the first was in An Ideal Husband), ably conveys Sarah’s passion as well as her confusions and soul-searching. She has nailed the English accent, though she needs to work on her cough. Stephen Rea, as her bland and blindly unaware husband, Harry, is superbly subdued, looking a lot like an anxiously repressed Dirk Bogarde.
Jordan tells the story through interwoven flashbacks, constantly moving back and forth between present and past. This can be a bit confusing at first, but it cleverly encapsulates a sense of the affair’s end being contained in its beginning, of the inevitability of an eventual break between the lovers even as they consummate their passion. Also skilfully done is the contrast between Bendrix’s narration and the irruption of Sarah’s voice when she tells her side of the story.
The movie looks good, all shades of stony grey and leached browns, drenched in rain as though its London were perpetually weeping. Jordan makes little of the edgily exciting atmosphere of wartime, during which the story is set, but it hovers in the background and in the gloom of this time of blackouts and sudden air-raids.
Greene said that every writer needs in his heart a splinter of ice, and there is something chilly and nasty in the portrayal of the vengeful Bendrix, as well as in the cruelties of the plot. But The End of the Affair makes one think that perhaps he needed some ice in his heart to prevent it from bursting.