Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4878 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-04-11
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 96 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
A red hot-air balloon floating gracefully over the green English countryside leads to a shocking death in Enduring Love, an eerie and hypnotic movie based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Two men tried and failed to help, and afterwards Joe (Daniel Craig, Sylvia, The Mother) finds himself being stalked by the hungry-eyed Jed (Rhys Ifans, Vanity Fair, Human Nature). Like a gangly wraith, Jed follows Joe and begs him to recognize the passionate love Jed feels certain was sparked by the balloon accident. Jed's obsession crawls into Joe's head and his life, clawing at his happy relationship with his girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton, Morvern Callar, Minority Report) and derailing Joe into an obsessive spiral of his own. Enduring Love builds the taut delirium of a Hitchcock movie. Ifans, best known for his comic performances, curls his tall frame into a seemingly helpless but creepily aggressive shuffle; the haunted eyes of Craig and Morton make the crumbling of their relationship as suspenseful as Jed's stalking. Director Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Persuasion) uses fresh, jarring images and sinuous visual rhythms to craft a tight thriller with unsettling emotional layers. --Bret Fetzer

Synopsis
While enjoying a romantic picnic in the English countryside, Joe (Daniel Craig) and Claire (Samantha Morton) become party to a tragic accident involving a hot air balloon. Haunted by the incident, and guilt-stricken that he wasn't able to do more, Joe begins to distance himself from Claire. But more disturbing is the behaviour of Jed (Rhys Ifans), another stranger who lent a hand during the accident and begins stalking Joe. At first, Joe thinks that Jed is just suffering from posttraumatic stress and needs to talk about what they've been through together. But with each encounter, as Jed admonishes Joe to let go and admit his feelings, Joe feels more and more uneasy, confused and irritated. This psychological thriller from director Roger Michell (NOTTING HILL) explores how one experience can affect many people in different ways while also examining the subtleties of love and relationships. Craig is superb as Joe, a natural-born leader and rational college professor whose life is turned upside down both by his inability to prevent the accident, and by his interactions with Jed. Ifans is super creepy as the disturbed stalker, a far cry from his turn as the loveable goof Spike in NOTTING HILL.

Customer Reviews

This isn't 'Enduring Love'
First of all this is a an OK thriller. But this isn't Enduring Love. All of the science and reasons for Parry's obsession are extracted, an extra character is added for absolutely no reason, the end of the book is changed to a happy crowd-pleasing affair so you're eventually left with an alright thriller with vaguely homophobic overtones. It's a shame really, as Craig makes for a magnificent Joe Rose, Rhys Ifans is wonderfulyl creepy as Jed Parry, and the direction is good. Like a said, an OK thriller, but not Enduring Love.

We can't let go of our illusions.
Condensing 200 odd pages of deep philosophical McKewen themes into a 90 minute film is no easy task, and judging from many of the reviews both online and offline that tend to see this as just as another mediocre thriller about pyschological obsession, one might think that Roger Michell has failed miserably in his task.

Bar the ending, the film adaptation certainly follows the Ian McKewan book quite faithfully, with the minor changes that have been made, such as Joe becoming a published academic who teaches his students that love is simply a darwinian trick to get us to copulate, designed seemingly to stress the key issues of the original novel - can man live guided only by a scientific understanding of himself and the world, and would such a life in fact be worth living?

These conundrums are expressed in the film sometimes a little too obviously to the point of crudeness (the camera zooms in and out of focus from a dazed Jed to a bunch of ripe apples). But the consequences of eating from forbidden fruit of knowledge, the letting go of innocent and empty illusions and the resulting madness and chaos, are brought to life on the whole superbly, especially in the opening of the film, pure McKewen of course, but in Michell's cinematic evocation of it, simply unforgettable. As Joe lets go of the doctor, the boy and the balloon, just as he has let go of the safe and contented predictablity of everyday faith in the world, its love and its meanings, he discovers that only unpredictable tragedy ensues.

And yet this film, a little like the novel, never quite becomes the classic that you feel it could and should have been. Despite this, it remains a well crafted, admirably acted and, so long as you don't try to understand the apparently confusing plot as a simple thriller, a film with lots of rewarding meaning to extract.

Disappointing, it didn't live up to the novel
I studied Ian McEwan's 'Enduring Love' as part of my A Level English Literature course and I loved the novel. The descriptions were excellent and the jammed packed action kept me reading on. However a lot of the key events were missed out of the film, making the overall viewing slow and uneventful. If they had included more scenes such as the resturaunt shooting, the visits to the police station and Joe's purchase of the gun, It could have been a great movie!!!