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In writer-director Neil Jordan's "The End of the Affair," a turbulent and imaginative reworking of Graham Greene's strange, classic novel about a devastating romance, Julianne Moore has a unique mixture of fire and contemplation, discipline and sublimity. She's like Aphrodite and Athena fused into one.

Moore won praise -- and notoriety -- for a bottomless turn in "Short Cuts" and as the slightly faded porn star in "Boogie Nights." But only here and in "Vanya on 42nd Street" has Moore had the opportunity onscreen to display her full range of instinct, passion and intellect. In "The End of the Affair," your head wrestles with Greene's themes and ambiguities while your heart swells and bursts at the sight of her elation and suffering. She provides the ballast that gives the movie's blend of acerbic observation, sentiment and theology its powder-keg potency.

Moore plays Sarah Miles, a married Englishwoman who falls for saturnine novelist Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) in wartime London, liberating herself sexually and emotionally while bombs fall and buildings crumble in the Blitz. Moore succeeds in creating a figure who changes form and color like a printed 3D image that alters when you shift it from side to side.

If she didn't, the film would fail, because Greene and Jordan have told this story as a tale of two lovers who see life in opposite ways, right down to the fervor they once shared. Bendrix narrates from the perspective of a jilted man: The movie begins two years after Sarah abruptly ended their affair. Bendrix runs into her boring but goodhearted husband, a high-level bureaucrat named Henry (Stephen Rea, of "The Crying Game"), who suspects her of seeing someone else. Henry doesn't think that Bendrix is cuckolding him -- and, of course, the novelist no longer is.

But Bendrix, who gauges depth of love by the degree of jealousy it inspires, seizes the chance to turn the screw on his own obsession. He hires a private investigator to track Sarah's wanderings -- and tells the unconvinced agency director that he's doing it on the husband's behalf. The movie has elements of a mock-detective story, but midway through, when Bendrix finds what he's after -- the explanation for his and Sarah's breakup -- it evolves into a stirring fable of death and transfiguration. Director Jordan replays scenes that were filtered through Bendrix's longing and vengefulness -- this time with a spiritual dimension that is as unexpected and disorienting for the characters as it is for the audience.

Jordan is a wildly talented, daring and intelligent filmmaker with an intriguingly diverse list of credits. (They include "Mona Lisa," "Interview with the Vampire," "Michael Collins" and "The Butcher Boy.") He's a master at setting moods too vibrant and immediate to be called wistful or nostalgic, yet too odd to be grasped instantly. He's the rare director equally taken with the seductiveness of beautiful images and the power of language to find, express or transform the truth.

Generally, I think Jordan's best stuff derives from his own original scripts -- as the legion of fans of "The Crying Game," as well as the small group of us who prefer "The Miracle," would probably agree. But for two-thirds of "The End of the Affair" he does an astonishing job of fusing his pop-magical temperament with Greene's astringency and wit. And when the movie veers from arid Greene-land into verdant Jordan territory with a carnival getaway to Brighton, all one's objections dissolve under the spell of Moore's performance. (As a director of actresses, Jordan has few peers.) I'd put "The End of the Affair" just beneath the top rung of Jordan movies or Greene-based films (it's no "The Fallen Idol" or "The Third Man"), with Moore the critical element that makes it necessary viewing.

Jordan generates risky, rancorous comedy from the gulf between Bendrix's heightened erotic recollections and his lowdown pursuit of payback. Bendrix's unlikely lieutenants are a clumsy, empathic gumshoe and his apprentice son, a solemn, alert young boy with a birthmark that covers a whole side of his face. Jordan glides with remarkable assurance between past and present and among multiple points of view. Giving a charge to the film's broodingly intellectual brand of farce is the psychic rift common to betrayed lovers everywhere. On the one hand, Bendrix wants to pigeonhole Sarah as a banal straying lovebird. On the other, he would die to retain her as an amorous ideal.

This soft-boiled dick Parkis (Ian Hart) and his son Lance (Samuel Bould) conduct an investigation that parodies a just-the-facts approach to human relationships. It tells its own cautionary tale about the perils of circumstantial evidence, and becomes both touching and delicious, as Parkis and Lance begin to appreciate Sarah's worth beyond her seemingly sordid appointments and confessions. The way Jordan has tweaked the story, everything about these two comic, feeling creatures -- including Lance's birthmark -- mocks or shames Bendrix's cynicism.

Fiennes is remarkable at capturing the sensibility of a creepily smart novelist who luxuriates in anguish and is intent on worrying out feelings and incidents that defy rationalization. But Fiennes operates at a disadvantage, since his character comes through largely in narration. (Greene nicknamed the first-person novel his "I" book.) No matter how admirably Jordan distills Bendrix's and Greene's thoughts about, say, London on the eve of war, the director doesn't replicate the vortex of observations that suck the novel's readers into Bendrix's tortured consciousness.

Next page | Sarah prays for a miracle, and gets more than she hoped for