Enduring Love (2004) 7/10
Joe (Daniel Craig) and Claire (Samantha Morton) witness a hot air balloon nearly crash in the field where they are picnicking. Joe and four other men try to save the boy trapped inside. When a gust of wind lifts the balloon back up, four let go; one holds on too long and dies in the fall.
All of this serves as a prelude. The movie which then unfolds involves Joe’s remorse and growing obsession with the accident, and its effect on his relationship with Claire. Complicating things is Jed (Rhys Ifans), another would-be rescuer who is now obsessed with Joe.
The pacing of Enduring Love is kind of lovely. The relationships are played out in silence and touch more than in conversation. The cast is good. There are oddities and gaps as well; like the people here seem never to have heard of stalking, or grieving, or trauma. Sometimes, when I’m watching these slow-paced things, I get to asking myself ‘is this beautiful and Art, or is this lame?’ Such analysis cannot bring a conclusion; instead, it’s better to check in with the gut experience, and on that level, I was totally buying it. I wanted to see what happened next.
The subtext is strange and fascinating. Joe is some sort of scientist/professor/author; it’s not clear if his area is behaviorism or evolution or what, but he talks a lot about how emotion is meaningless except as an evolutionary force. Love is something that evolved to make us fuck. Nothing has meaning except as a means of perpetuating the species. At first his friends are bemused by this, but as he becomes more distant and confused in the wake of the accident, as the absence of meaning becomes more painful in the face of his guilt, they offer less sympathy.
Jed is the opposite, a spiritual person obsessed with love and meaning. Jed and Joe are the first to find the crushed body of the dead man, and immediately Jed suggests they pray together. Joe wants nothing to do with prayer, but Jed persists.
When Jed begins stalking Joe, the latter takes forever to realize this is untoward behavior. On the one hand, it’s annoying. On the other, it’s striking evidence of how badly Joe is reacting to the accident; he assumes that Jed is having the same reaction, and so doesn’t read the obvious signals about what Jed’s behavior really means. It’s obvious (to me anyway) from their first post-accident meeting that Jed has romantic feelings towards Joe, but Joe doesn’t catch on. He’s a narcissist, who sees the world in terms of his own experience; of course a narcissist feels neurotically responsible for an accident. And of course a narcissist thinks that other people feel what he feels, and doesn’t inquire further.
Is the movie homophobic? I’ve seen it criticized as such; as playing on the crazed gay stalker stereotype, and contrasting it with the sweet heterosexual couple we root for. Poor Claire, competing with the crazy gay man! But the odd thing is that homosexuality is here paired with religion, and heterosexuality with atheism. Sort of the opposite of the current right wing thought control.
Joe doesn’t believe in love, only in the procreative urge. His biological determinism has no place for homosexuality; it’s inherently homophobic, because any feeling that doesn’t drive towards reproduction is, in Joe’s philosophy, perverse. He never says this about Teh Gay, but he does give a lecture asking if misplaced love, or the loss of love, isn’t a “perversion” of the evolutionary force. While he never mentions homosexuality (at all, which is pretty weird in a lecture about sexual motivations), he uses the words “perverse” and “deviant” just before Jed shows up, so hello reading between the lines.
Jed is deranged and creepy. He is also trying to awaken Joe spiritually. One truth he brings is that love (in his view) is always and first God’s love (hence the title). The implication seems to be that if God brings all love, then and only then can homosexuality be a blessing from God, whereas if biological determinism rules the day, Teh Gay is Teh Wrong.
Of course, all of this leaves pleasure and orgasm entirely out of the equation, which makes it a dumb argument. But it’s fascinating to see God on the side of gays for a change, and straights on the side of atheism and evolution. Food for thought.
