The Torture of Adaptation: Enduring Love (dir. Roger Michell, 2004)

Enduring Love, the novel by Ian McEwan, was recieved in 1997 with mixed reviews, polarised by alternate accusations of genuis and tedium. It is not the first of McEwan's novels to create such a divide, but the recent cinematic success of Atonement begs a re-viewing of Roger Michell's adaptation of Enduring Love (2004), the critically acclaimed yet relatively small adaptation of the original novel. The traditional academic problems of adaptation are implicit in a text which relies so much on ambiguity, and the film was received in much the same way as the novel. Centred around a tragic balloon accident, and the subsequent homo-erotic obsession which springs from the horror, Enduring Love explores the nature of obsession, religion, and the pain of love. Jed Parry (Rhys Ifans) - a lonely young man driven by a fierce religious belief - begins after the accident to stalk fellow witness Joe Rose (Daniel Craig) to the point of mania, and it is on this point of interaction that the plot turns. The adrenalised opener to Enduring Love is pitch-perfect; the jarring camera shots and breathless background noise suffuse, upon re-reading, the textual opening the novel provides with all of the merits of the visual. The drama actualised sets the viewers heart racing in a way the text does not, impressively written as it is. Michell is bordering on scientific in his portrayal of the accident; the aerial shot of each character running towards the balloon over a spread of green field has an almost mathematically aesthetic quality – a mathematical grace. It captures the inevitability of their decisions, charts their collision course and actualises the fate of Jed Parry and Joe: running towards each other, towards sorrow, with their arms outstretched. Both visually and emotionally, it is perfect in it’s loyalty to the blueprint of the novel, and in its rendering of the finality of Joe’s ordinary life; here is the beginning of the destruction of Joe Rose. There have been many changes effected by Roger Michell which seem to have a rather arbitrary motivation. The name changes – namely of Joe’s lover from Clarissa to Claire (Samantha Morton) - are unnecessary, and the details which have been almost surgically removed – Parry’s religious obsession, Joe’s preoccupation with returning to the field of academia – seem to detract from the seamless quality of the narrative itself. Parry of the novel is not a religious obsessive because the author thought it would be interesting, he is a religious obsessive to provide a focal counterpoint for Joe’s humanistic fatalism. Their individual obsessions are the twin threads which bind the narrative structure – Joe’s faith in science becomes the sparring partner for Parry’s faith in God, and Parry’s mania is born from a belief that he is the agent of the Lord, sent to kick-start Joe’s conversion – ‘Everything we do together, everything we are is in God’s care, and our love takes its existence, form, and meaning from His love.’ Lacking this religious drive, Parry on screen becomes weaker, less threatening: a clichéd 2-D construction of a happenstance stalker.

Parry’s home also morphs from a neat, well-kept mansion in a leafy part of London to a squalid, depressing flat, where rights of ownership appear to be non-existent, and a predictable shrine to Joe oppresses the small, dark space. Perhaps more visually arresting, yes, and certainly more in keeping with the Parry of Michell’s construction. Yet it appears last-minute; a slapdash effort to hammer home to the audience Parry’s inability to function, his exclusion from normality – it smacks of overkill.
Cinematically, Claire’s passion for the visual provides an excellent counterpoint for Joe’s more unseen pursuits; concerned with searching for the meaning of love, Joe in the film is portrayed as a man who lives in his own head. Clarissa’s textual obsession with love becomes Joe’s obsession on screen, he is a man determined to root out the biological cause of the phenomenon of love, explaining it away as a procreative necessity Undeniably, it is a powerful piece of cinema. Taken on its own merits, quite apart from its source novel, it is thrilling, engaging, in parts quite gripping. The unresolved ending works, as it is a final piece of human ambiguity after the grimly concrete and fatalistic scenes which have preceded. Humanity, with all its flaws, has managed to overcome a cause and effect universe so devoid of sympathy. And yet when taken in comparison to the novel, all of those things which make it an excellent film seem suddenly inherently wrong, flawed, a directorial self-indulgence, marking Michell’s intention to be thought of as the auteur of this film.
Altogether, then, if taken within it's own context, Enduring Love cannot fail to move, to evoke the strong reactions necessary to a films success. It is only when compared to its source text that it evokes a palpable sense of disappointment.