The End of the Affair

(Columbia Tristar)

The obsessive, meditative, even whiny style and substance of Graham Greene's autobiographical novel are a challenge for the screen, but Neil Jordan warms to the task. It's London on the eve of World War II (as told in elaborate flashbacks), and writer Maurice (Ralph Fiennes, tight-lipped in his randiness and self-loathing) is researching government minister Henry (Stephen Rea, playing an ineffectual prig) for a novel, but then he falls for Henry's wife, Sarah (a pale Julianne Moore). There are two versions of the adulterous love affair: Maurice's and, by means of a purloined diary, Sarah's. And then there's the One -- Graham Greene territory. Jordan ably suggests the immanence of the divine; less effective, however, are his reliance on voiceover passages from the original and Greene's fatal melodramatic device of illness.