Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD Brand: Sony EAN: 9780767847414 Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC ISBN: 0767847415 Label: Sony Pictures Manufacturer: Sony Pictures Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Sony Pictures Region Code: 1 Release Date: May 16, 2000 Running Time: 102 minutes Sales Rank: 11869 Studio: Sony Pictures Theatrical Release Date: 1999
Product Description: In london after world war ii novelist maurice bendrix goes to great lengths to destroy and perhaps reclaim his mistress sarah after shed unaccountably left him 18 months before. In a world torn apart by conflict three peoples lives are changed forever by the searing passion of a forbidden love affair. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 03/22/2005 Starring: Ralph Fiennes Stephen Rea Run time: 109 minutes Rating: R Director: Neil Jordan
Amazon.com essential video: 'This is a diary of hate,' pounds out novelist Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) on his typewriter as he recounts the lost love of his life in this spiritual memoir (based on Graham Greene's novel) with a startling twist. It's London 1946, and Maurice runs into his achingly dull school friend Henry (Stephen Rea with a perpetually gloomy hangdog expression). Their meeting is brittle, all small talk and chilly, mannered civility beautifully captured by director-screenwriter Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), and it only barely thaws when Henry suggests that his wife, Sarah (the luminous Julianne Moore), may be having an affair. Maurice's mind reels back to his passionate affair with Sarah during the war years, which she abruptly broke off two years ago. Gripped with a jealousy that hasn't abated, he hires a private detective (a mousy, marvelous Ian Hart) to shadow her movements. He prepares himself for the revelation of a rival but instead finds a deeper, more profound secret: 'I tempted fate,' she writes in her diary, 'and fate accepted.'
Jordan's cool remove captures the unease beneath formal manners but never warms into intimacy during the scenes between the lovers, even while Fiennes and Moore almost explode in repressed emotions, their faces cracking under their masks of civility and their resolve shaking through jittery body language. There's more thought than feeling behind this collision of passion and spirituality, but it's a sincere, richly realized portrait of ennui and rage against God energized by brief moments of shattering drama. --Sean Axmaker
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Rating: - Love! Hate! Straight faces!
Writer Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) and married Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore) had a love affair for several years until she abruptly ended it. Two years later, Maurice meets her husband who suspects she is carrying on with someone; Maurice hires a private investigator to follow her, and falls in love with Sarah again.
This is probably a tear-jerking, steamy, and sentimental love story but I just didn't feel it. Fiennes, Moore and Stephen Rea, as Sarah's husband, play 95% of their scenes in slow-motion, with completely expressionless faces staring blankly into each other's eyes while their stoic voices recite passionate lines. I suppose it's meant to be very sophisticated and posh, but it seemed phony and empty to me. The character I liked best was Parkis, the private investigator, played by Ian Hart. (Note to Harry Potter fans: This movie has Professor Quirrell, Lucius Malfoy, and Voldemort all ... Read More
Rating: - 'The end of the affair'
Wonderful movie, but then I was brought up in England during the era so it is very familiar in all aspects. Just adore Ralph Fiennes.
Rating: - A terrible adaptation and performance
Not long ago I read Graham Greene's wonderful, "The End of the Affair". I was so impressed that I sought out a film version, and was again captivated with the 1955 production starring Van Johnson, Deborah Kerr, and Basil Rathbone. Loving the story and wanting more, I obtained the 1999 version starring Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, and Stephen Rea. What a disappointment. Typical modern Hollywood alteration and cheapening of a great story and truth.
If I may expand a bit, in the order of least importance to greatest importance: Julianne Moore is only minimally attractive, and her flat acting performance in this role makes her even less so. The sex and nudity was gratuitous. (Wrapping this piece in a Graham Greene cloak does not make it less the soft core presentation that it is). The WWII England aura seems to have been diminished. Perhaps when the original film was made, memories were fresh . . ... Read More
Rating: - torrid romance set in war-ravaged london
This excellent movie -- released in 1999 and based on the slim novel by Graham Greene published in 1951 -- wholly baptizes contemporary viewers into the cultural context of a time and place that nowadays exists only in the memories of those who were of age during WWII.
But even those of us who for the first time encounter Greene's works (whether his novels or the several popular movies based on them) in the twenty-first century can thank God for these reality-saturated tales, which, so much like the stories of the Old Testament, demonstrate that the God who created the universe is not, after all, a prissy protestant church lady, unwilling to soil white gloves in gripping encounters with messy, irrational humans.
Graham, who converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, seems in the stories he tells to be well acquainted with a God who is not too nice for humanity -- not even for the foremost ... Read More
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- Love! Hate! Straight faces!
- 'The end of the affair'
- A terrible adaptation and performance
