|
Advertisement |
Overall Rating
  Awesome: 9.09%
Worth A Look: 41.82%
Average: 25.45%
Pretty Bad: 10.91%
Total Crap: 12.73%
5 reviews, 25 user ratings
|
|
| End Of The Affair, The |
by iF Magazine
"Handsomely mounted, yet trivial."
|
Is there any other director working today more erratic than Neil Jordan? When he gets it right, like he did with the criminally underrated BUTCHER BOY, he fashions one of the best films of the decade. But when he gets it wrong, whoa boy, we end up with horribly unthrilling thrillers like IN DREAMS.Jordan’s latest, THE END OF THE AFFAIR, should be one of his good ones. He's back on near native soil and he’s adapting a novel, by Graham Greene, that he clearly respects. AFFAIR is the tragic romantic tale of Maurice (Ralph Fiennes) and Sarah (Julianne Moore). Maurice loves Sarah, Sarah is married to old stick in the mud Henry and WWII is breaking out all over war torn London. War torn London? A romantic triangle with Fiennes at the center? Is this ENGLISH PATIENT 2? Not hardly. More like a bloodless tear jerker about doing the right thing and finding god.
For this sort of classy tear jerker to work well, you really just need three things: an appealing couple, some heart tugging circumstances and a swell musical score. Well, would you settle for one out of three? (Michael Nyman's lush soundtrack swells when it needs to but it’s all for naught.) Fiennes and Moore have about as much (or rather little) on-screen chemistry as Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson had in the also turgid 1955 original of the same name.
And the tragic circumstances?
About half way through THE END OF THE AFFAIR one of the main characters stops mid-line to deliver a soft cough. An audible gasp went out over the audience. Could it be? Yes, further scenes and increasingly bad fake coughing can only mean one thing. One of our heroes was suffering from a fatal case of Hollywood movie disease. From Bette Davis in DARK VICTORY to Clint Eastwood in HONKY TONK MAN, it’s one of moviedom’s favorite, trivial devices.
Handsomely mounted, staged and shot Jordan lets the weight of adapting a legendary author (Greene’s novels were the source for classics like THE 3RD MAN and ODD MAN OUT) drain all the life from the project leaving a wanting audience frustrated. It didn’t have to be this way. From her incessant whining and pining in END to her obnoxious pixiness in COOKIES FORTUNE and her manic bitch-on-wheels turn in MAGNOLIA, I’m just plain sick of Julliane Moore. She’s got the technical goods and can cry ‘til her freckles fall off, but a romantic leading lady she ain’t.
Fiennes, as the god-cursing male lead, is always a cold fish (something about those dead Richard Gere-like eyes) and END doesn’t have the benefit of a flesh and blood actress like ENGLISH PATIENT’s Kirsten Scott Thomas to balance things.Stephen Rea, as the cock hold husband Henry seems to be having the best time here, he’s in his subtle, confident mode. If you’re looking for love you’d be better off jumping next door to MANSFIELD PARK. Or even DEUCE BIGALOW.-- Johnny Clay
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1813&reviewer=119
originally posted: 02/23/01 15:40:36
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
USA
03-Dec-1999 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
09-Mar-2000
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed
![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
