The End of the Affair (1999), with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore: A Film Review

The bottom line: This movie seems so simple in its story, in its words, and yet the script and scenes unfold so brilliantly that (almost) every single moment of the movie is to be treasured. "Dear Maurice, you can't go on fighting. It's only love, after all."

P.S. Well, I have to add this. I would have liked just a little bit more complexity. What exactly did she love in him, and what did he love in her? It's suggested they're both complex characters, and yet that complexity leaves too much to be guessed at.

Yes, I went on to read my first Graham Greene book. Never too late to start. The Burnt-Out Case, it was called. It's a book about an architect named Querry who seeks oblivion in a fictional Congo, at a leproserie run by a number of Christian fathers. There he engages with the fathers, the doctors, a journalist who comes looking for him in that remote village, a businessman and his wife. The book is a great deal about lost faith, but it deals with other themes as well.

Reading the book it appeared at first that the writer was too detached from his story and characters. Maybe that was the point, to convey a sense of "lack," as Giles Foden writes in the Introduction to the 2004 Vintage edition. Foden perceived it "at the level of novelistic satisfaction, if not psychological impact." I agree that psychologically it doesn't pull us in with the urgency that some writers weave. And yet, for the message to work, the book probably had to be this way.

When I finished it, I felt pain exactly where I expected the writer to touch me all along. When Querry's life was taken away, I felt I wanted the man alive. Felt I had become involved with him after all despite the fact that throughout the book I didn't sympathize with the way he was struggling with his missing faith. I felt his words were repetitive, but it was those repetitive words, brushing over a faith that was no longer in his heart, that eventually sent home the vacuity that disbelieving (rather than not having any faith at all) feels like.

So in the end it was quite an interesting experiment for a novel about faith. And I felt the story was quite appropriate to underline various thoughts on having and working in faith, missing faith rather than lacking faith, lacking faith, and deceiving yourself that you have faith. The characters are representative of all these positions (the fathers; Querry; the doctor; Ryker).

I now want to read The End of the Affair and The Quiet American, and see their 1950s movie incarnations.