But both Robin, with his admiration, and Joe, with his feelings of inadequacy, are buying into a myth of heroism, ignoring the plain truth that an unthinking competence takes over in many of us during moments of disaster.
Robin, being honest but also trying to bolster his friend, says he himself would have been a gibbering idiot in those circumstances. Both the content and the rhythm of the conversation in this scene feels authentic. The next scene, where Joe relates the ordeal over dinner to his friends Robin (the wonderful Bill Nighy) and Rachel (Susan Lynch), suggests that the movie is going to be about Joe's survivor's guilt (he believes he could have done more to prevent the disaster) and about how we are cut adrift by the sudden, absurd intrusion of death into the safety of our lives. Other men in the field join in the rescue attempt and by a cruel twist, both grandson and grandfather are saved while one of the rescuers is killed. These moments before Joe acts to help the man and his grandson, a hesitation that feels like an eternity, are one of the most effective depictions of the intrusion of catastrophe into everyday life that I've ever seen in a movie. The matter of factness with which Michell and his cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos shoot this sight gives it the quality of the truly surreal: It's concrete, undeniable, and yet you can't process it. A young boy stands helplessly in the basket while his grandfather tries to stop it from ascending. Suddenly, Claire is distracted from the question she can tell is coming by the sight of a hot-air balloon skimming the field. It's a bright, cloudless day, the setting one of those impossibly green English fields. Joe (Daniel Craig), a university lecturer, takes his live-in girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton) on a picnic with the intent of asking her to marry him. The opening of "Enduring Love" has the lucidity of a very bad dream. That may not be at first apparent, perhaps because Michell sucks you right into the story. "Enduring Love" is about how a man who is incapable of love is made a better person when he's stalked by a psychotic. "Enduring Love" is the looniest bit of special pleading for the deranged since Peter Shaffer's "Equus." In that play, a teenage boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike is held up by his impotent, disillusioned psychiatrist as an exemplar of passion in a passionless world. Having seen Roger Michell's film of the novel, I'm relieved that someone else shared my reading of the book, and appalled to have that reading confirmed. After finishing Ian McEwan's novel "Enduring Love" I felt that the book surely couldn't be saying what it appeared to be saying, and yet I couldn't see any other possible interpretation.
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