"Enduring Love"

"Enduring Love" is skillfully, if showily, made. Michell's direction doesn't have the art-installation starkness it had in his last film, "The Mother," but he still makes a spectacle of his technique. (The medium shots, in which characters are held in close-up while we peer to see what they're looking at in the blurry background become especially annoying.)

The picture is being sold as if it were a thriller, and it might be useful to look at it as if it were. Hitchcock used the derogatory name "the plausibles" to refer to the people who asked him why his characters didn't just go to the police. It's hard not to feel like one of the plausibles, though, while you're wondering why Joe doesn't report the cuckoo Jed. Granted, if the stalking laws in the U.K. are anything like they are in the U.S., the response Joe would be likely to get would be pitifully inadequate. But Joe doesn't even consider going to the cops. And even though a madman is sitting across the street watching his bedroom window through the night, nobody -- especially not Claire (Morton is, as always, believable, but wasted in a girlfriend role) -- considers this might be what's making Joe so difficult.

But if "Enduring Love" doesn't make sense as a thriller, it's equally nonsensical as the parable it wants to be. The movie raises the specter of Jed's fear of his homosexual feelings for Joe and the way he tries to pass those feelings off as religious and nonsexual. (And it should be said that Ifans is excellent in an essentially unplayable role, bringing us as close as we can come to empathy for the insane, destructive Jed. ) But neither Michell nor screenwriter Joe Penhall -- nor, I'm betting, McEwan -- probe Jed's psychology very deeply, for the same reason they don't send Joe to the cops: They want nothing to hinder Jed in his role as the movie's deus ex machina.

Several times we see Joe lecturing his classes about how love and goodness may simply be constructs human beings have devised to make our biological imperatives seem more noble than they are. At home, he's more and more distant from Claire. Joe isn't a bad person -- he doesn't kill or steal, he doesn't cheat on Claire, he pitches right into a dangerous rescue effort. We may all know somebody like Joe -- decent but cold (the distracted quality in Daniel Craig's acting plays into Joe's aloofness) -- and we may like them but not be particularly anxious to spend time with them. But a character who questions the reality of love, who wonders if goodness isn't a human construct instead of a moral value, is just the sort to bring out the combination of social worker and missionary that resides in some people. They conclude -- as the movie concludes -- that such a person must be leading an empty life. So in the movie's scheme Jed, who represents unwavering faith in love taken to a crazy extreme, is the avenging angel sent to punish the cold, analytical Joe for his inability to love.

The only reason the filmmakers get away with this scenario is that Joe is a man. Try to imagine the reaction to a movie where an independent woman was stalked by a man who insists, despite her protestations, that she is really in love with him. And imagine the reaction if the movie said she were a better person because of it, as "Enduring Love" says that Joe winds up a better, more loving man.

There are a few oases of sanity in all this. Corin Redgrave, as a witness to the accident, has one scene late in the film that delineates a survivor's guilt without the masochism that hangs over the rest of the movie. And in three brief scenes, Helen McCrory, as the widow of the man killed in the rescue attempt, demonstrates the skill she did in her one scene in "Charlotte Gray": She's so good she stops the movie dead in its tracks. She is the most effective sort of scene stealer, not one who accomplishes it by design or deviousness, but by embodying her role so fully and believably that she makes the reality of everything around her suspect.

Calling "Enduring Love" an irresponsible movie only invokes the specious argument that movies can send crazy people over the edge. I don't believe that. But I do think Ian McEwan in writing the novel, and Michell and Penhall in making this film, have been callous. Perhaps they've been lucky enough to be spared the nutters that writers and artists can attract. But you don't have to be famous to be stalked and what would any of them say, I wonder, to someone who has -- that they should open themselves up to a potential growth experience? "Enduring Love" takes the "You're not crazy, you're special" argument to a new extreme. It's affirmative action for psychos.

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