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In Moore's hands, Sarah is both a coherent and an almost contradictory figure, balancing qualities of containment and spontaneity. During their initial flirtation and first date, something in the way she moves attracts Bendrix like no other lover, though to the casual onlooker she could seem simply gracious and organized. When she achieves orgasm, it isn't with a playful "When-Harry-Met-Sally" moan but with a piercing cry; and when her husband picks that moment to come home, she has the wit to reassure Bendrix that Henry wouldn't recognize the sound. Even during her and Bendrix's awful fights about the nature of love and her marriage to Henry, Moore conveys something hard and crucial -- an ecstatic peace. Then, in one terrifying moment, Sarah's peace is shattered, and Moore comes to embody bereavement and sacrifice. In spite of herself, she is transformed into a tragic heroine.

To detail what happens would rob the film of a critical turnaround. Sarah prays for a miracle, and gets more than she feared or hoped for. In reshaping the final section of the book, Jordan downplays explicit theological arguments and allows Bendrix and Sarah to share fleeting moments of doomed joy and emotional reconciliation. He conflates a couple of characters and shuffles around a marvel and an epiphany. But the film holds true to the war Bendrix wages in the book against Sarah's acceptance of a Catholic view of the universe, and his weary recognition of a God he hates is as hard-fought as Greene dramatized.

Jordan embodies the religious dialectic more firmly in the central characters: Bendrix becomes, in the film, the story's sole voice of disbelief. As a result, audiences of all kinds may find it easier to recognize in this tale not just the force of belief and the wonder of transcendence, but also the humbling difficulty of absorbing it. In general, Jordan's casting and directing choices open up the story in the best way -- to expanded human possibilities. Henry pitilessly owns up to his own shortcomings and doesn't limit his wife or Bendrix to an aggrieved husband's view of them -- and Rea, in a quietly magnificent performance, fills up this hollow man with a pure and pliant spirit. Hart and Bould pull off the equivalent feat of keeping Parkis and Lance from becoming mere lovable clowns. They have their own magnanimity and dignity -- even a skewed heroism -- that makes them more deeply funny.

After the bracing pure cinema of his horror film "In Dreams" (which was unfairly dumped, and dumped-on, earlier this year), Jordan works to serve the material. He comes up with glancing master-strokes, like the fairy-tale first sight we get of the Blitz, with a bomb puffing a domed building in the distance, or the simple, intuitive shifts in camera angles that express the chasm between Bendrix's and Sarah's points of view.

Most important, Jordan provides Julianne Moore with a superb showcase. Some "serious" movie critics are too often prone to overvaluing directors and writers and undervaluing performers. In a major role like this one, an actor as great as Moore can be an auteur, too. In many ways Sarah couldn't be more different from Yelena in "Uncle Vanya." Yet Moore's protean creativity, and her uncanny fix on what is ambiguous and paradoxical, link and elevate the two characters. What Andre Gregory told me about her stage performance in "Vanya" fits several of her crisis points in "The End of the Affair": "What she's showing is a person who doesn't believe she has the capacity to feel, so when she laughs or cries there's a choking hysteria about it." Moore's Sarah, like her Yelena, "seems like a candle that's desperately trying to stay lit -- or the gold on the last leaves of autumn when winter is coming."
salon.com | Dec. 3, 1999

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