September 21, 2004
By Matt Savelloni
“LUST'S PASSION WILL BE SERVED; IT DEMANDS, IT MILITATES, IT TYRANNIZES.” – Marquis de Sade
Ian McEwan is a less wordy Philip Roth but that doesn’t make him any less pretentious. Like the grand entry of THE HUMAN STAIN, the intro of ENDURING LOVE packs a wallop before deflating in a similar, albeit quicker, fashion to Roth’s work. Promised an upended tale of lust and obsession, readers are soon left with a dull sequence of internal musings, as if the book was suddenly seized by a college plebian trying to impress his coffee house friends with Creative Writing 101 pap.
Stephen King in his brilliant ON WRITING breaks down the creation of literary impulses into narration (or “action”), description and dialogue. It’s phenomenally simple. Yet so many navel-gazing writers lack the discipline to stick to such basic tenets of convincing authorship. Not that King is the preeminent voice behind all great composition but his modest declaration to the contrary makes him a very credible source. Let’s face it: writing boils down to storytelling. McEwan tells a tale that has been beaten to death, dug up and beaten again and tries to enliven it with preening stream-of-conscious.
ENDURING LOVE begins with a picnic in a park on a beautiful sunny day. A hot air balloon suddenly descends and as lovers Joe and Clarissa watch, the pilot is caught up in the ropes while a little boy looks on helplessly from the basket. Joe and a host of other park-dwellers run to their hopeless rescue, ensnaring our interest and attention in just a few pages. Immediately invested in such a unique fight for survival and the way in which it literally descends on the main characters, we see a theme of random encounters that fuel, navigate and alter lives irrevocably. It is during this sudden drama that Joe catches the eye of – or, rather, his eye is caught by – one Jed Parry. And in those scant seconds of intensity, a deadly obsession is launched, a new calamity born of the one in their hands.
“DESIRE OF HAVING IS THE SIN OF COVETOUSNESS.” – William Shakespeare
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As Jed begins to stalk and harass Joe and Clarissa, the sense of menace rises in tandem with Joe’s frustration at the misfortune of the encounter. Yes, it’s an old story, updated by basing the mania on homoerotic tendencies, but nevertheless, one we have encountered multiple times previously. And guess what? This old saw still cuts. The stalker/murderer icon has endured since Jack The Ripper because it is rooted in reality. The nightly news is filled with stories of envious fury. In new generations exceedingly trained not to take “no” for an answer, to deny failure and win at all costs, we find increasing numbers of narcissistic, fanatical cretins who believe they are entitled to obtain and control everything they see. By binding ourselves to desire, we become enslaved to its single-minded call until all reason, empathy and restraint are wiped away. Jed is a psychopath, undoubtedly, but he is also a modern Frankenstein, built off our politically correct, patronizing and self-indulgent age and rage.
Incredibly, McEwan shutters such dramatic context to focus on the trite dispensations of Joe and his fascination with contingencies. Even as a lunatic leaves countless messages on their machine and makes not-so-vague threats against Clarissa – a complete cipher in McEwan’s world – Joe frets over the arbitrariness of his fate. Dealing with the threat of Jed becomes secondary – both in Joe’s world and in McEwan’s increasingly sidetracked narrative – to examining the myriad of circumstances that placed this young couple in the vengeful path of a human disaster. By the time the final conflict arrives, the mounting vortex of Jed’s arduous addiction resolves in a perfunctory scene of sudden marksmanship that completes the lack of urgency underscoring all of ENDURING LOVE. Stalkers are modern nightmares, real and harrowing. McEwan treats them like just another variable in this self-indulgent equation of a novel. I can’t tell if this is irresponsible writing or not, but it is most definitely tedious.
“DRAMA IS LIFE WITH THE DULL BITS CUT OUT.” – Alfred Hitchcock
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Hitch would have been perfect to liven up ENDURING LOVE. He understood mad passion and envy rooted deep in the psyche better than any other filmmaker. So I’m not sure what to make of Roger Michell helming this adaptation. On one hand, he directed NOTTING HILL, a gentile romantic comedy that draws nothing more than cursory attention. He is also the man who directed the vastly underrated CHANGING LANES, a morality piece dressed up as a thriller that works in both veins. Michell will be working from a script by Joe Penhall, an award-winning playwright with some minor TV and film experience. They are charged with finding the compelling reason for ENDURING LOVE’s existence.
Hollywood is rife with stalkers both onscreen and off. They have become almost a genre unto themselves from FATAL ATTRACTION to THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE to MISERY and EYE FOR AN EYE to THE FAN and ENOUGH. The majority of these films focus on violence and revenge, baseline thrillers offering mass appeal bloodlust. They are a mixed bag artistically as well as commercially because there is a heavy “been there, done that” feel to them. Two that stand out are an oldie but a goodie and an overlooked entry from a decade ago: Clint Eastwood’s PLAY MISTY FOR ME and Barbet Schroeder’s SINGLE WHITE FEMALE. They succeed by taking the time to examine the psychology of the stalker as well as the object of their mania. Although both films end in bloodshed, the climaxes are earned as inevitable ends to the dangerously fragile makeup of the offender. If Michell and Penhall are to find the persuasive core McEwan so completely neglects in ENDURING LOVE, they will have to augment the character examinations like Eastwood and Schroeder. If they fail to do so, we could be looking at THE CRUSH II.
“All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.” – Honore de Balzac
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