Fate -- out of the blue

The actor Rhys Ifans rarely alters his droopy-guy look -- and why should he? It’s worked for him since Roger Michell cast him as Hugh Grant’s slobby roommate in “Notting Hill.” Now Michell has directed an adaptation of Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan’s novel “Enduring Love,” and he’s endowed Ifans with a far meatier, more complex role. In the new movie, Ifans reprises the shaggy Jesus look that made him famous, but perversely subverts it. After this, he may have to retire the image for good. Even if he doesn’t, there’s at least one scene in “Enduring Love” that feels like fair compensation for that other movie, if not serious penance.

The difficulty/terrifying ease of letting go and moving on is central to McEwan’s story about an imagined relationship that threatens to destroy an actual one. And Michell’s smart, spooky and elegant screen version, adapted by playwright Joe Penhall, successfully dramatizes McEwan’s cerebral meditation on love and meaning.

Those who’ve missed the double meaning in the title might be tempted to skip the movie, so let me banish any latent Zeffirelli/Merchant-Ivory associations straight away. There’s nothing frilly or histrionic about “Enduring Love.” We’re conditioned as romantics to hear the first word as an adjective; but for most of the movie, it’s strictly a harrowing verb.

Joe Rose (Daniel Craig) is moments away from proposing to his girlfriend, Claire (Samantha Morton), during a picnic in the country, when their attention is diverted by a hot-air balloon sputtering uneasily along the ground. Joe runs to help, as do four other men, who appear as if out of nowhere. A sudden gust of wind pushes the balloon skyward. One of the men lets go, then the others. The remaining man, whom they later learn is a married physician from Oxford named John Logan, is propelled into the air. He rises, loses his grip and does a doomed airborne backstroke before landing like an overstuffed sack in a field of sheep.

The book, of course, also memorably opens with this moment, so the first few on-screen minutes are tense. Will Michell pull it off? Not that he hasn’t already taken care to set McEwan fans at ease. He’s approached the moment quietly, without the slightest hint of bombast. Shots of the sloping pastures are wide and patient. Just enough color is drained from the landscape to make everything feel bright but cold. Joe and Claire sit in comfortable silence, or don’t have much to say. And when it arrives, the movie’s most intense and lyrical scene is scored only with the sounds of wind, roaring fire and the thud of feet, then bodies, pounding the ground.

Naturally, the tragic death of John Logan takes a psychological toll on everyone involved. But three characters are hit especially hard. Racked with guilt, Joe becomes obsessed with finding out who let go of the balloon first. Racked with grief, Mrs. Logan (Helen McCrory) becomes obsessed with the idea that her husband was secretly unfaithful to her. And hit with a profound need to make some sense of his empty life, the ridiculous, lost Jed Parry (Ifans), who went with Joe to the see the broken body and harried him into kneeling with him in prayer, becomes obsessed with Joe.

“Enduring Love” is an intellectual investigation of love from three equally frustrating perspectives -- the physical, the spiritual and that mixture of emotion, psychology and interpretation we call art -- couched loosely in a cool stalker thriller. As if aware of the inherently high-pitched nature of the story -- in the wrong hands, it could have been “Fatal Attraction” or, worse, “Single White Female” -- the movie takes pains to run itself under the cold shower of a desaturated color scheme and frequent visual and musical allusions to Hitchcock. This goes on until the actual plot feels latent, as in the similarly themed “Strangers on a Train.” By the time the violent climax comes into sight, I wanted a return to the gloomy haze of wondering if Jed was alone in his nuttiness or if Joe had joined him.

Jed’s stalking of Joe starts subtly, unlike in the book, where it begins with a bang. The reasoning behind the choice is not immediately apparent, until it becomes slowly, unsettlingly clear that Joe’s need to figure out who let go of the balloon first is a search for absolution. This makes him more vulnerable to the madly Messianic Jed’s unconditional affection than he’d like to admit.

Changing Joe from a science writer to a biology professor who lectures on the evolutionary aspects of love works, as does the conversion of Claire from a lecturer to an artist. Joe and Claire’s work requires them to regard humanity in a cruelly objective light. When Joe complains that Claire won’t sculpt a bust of him, she says: “I need distance. I’d need to examine you, and I don’t want to examine you. I want you to be my lover, not my subject.”

The more Joe is harassed by Jed, who insists that their initial encounter “meant everything,” the more he relies on his newly adopted hard line of biological nihilism. Is love a trick played by nature to make us procreate? Is it meaningful only because we imbue it with meaning? Is all moral behavior an evolutionary tool? Of course, rejecting Jed’s love as meaningless on these grounds requires dismantling his love for Claire too.

Going against the traditional art/science type, Claire turns out to be surprisingly able to detach from her feelings, while Joe almost drowns in his turbulent emotions, even though he clings to rational thought like a life raft. It’s a nice reversal, one of many in the film.

But best of all is the public declaration, requisite in romantic comedies, when the lovesick protagonist belts out his feelings for the world to hear. Jed shows up in Joe’s classroom and squeaks out a love song: “God Only Knows.” It’s the scariest moment in the movie and a perfect send-up of the stalker-ish values promulgated by the average Julia Roberts vehicle.

After all, Jed’s just a boy, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love him too.

*

‘Enduring Love’

MPAA rating: R, for language, some violence and a disturbing image

Times guidelines: Swearing, some violence

Daniel Craig...Joe Rose

Rhys Ifans ...Jed Parry

Samantha Morton...Claire

Bill Nighy...Robin

Susan Lynch...Rachel

Helen McCrory...Mrs. Logan

Paramount Classics and Pathe Pictures present, in association with the UK Film Council and Film Four, and produced in association with Inside Track, a Free Range Films production, released by Paramount Classics. Director Roger Michell. Producer Kevin Loader. Executive producers Francoise Ivernel, Cameron McCracken, Duncan Reid, Tessa Ross. Screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Ian McEwan. Director of photography Haris Zambarloukos. Editor Nic Gaster. Costume designer Natalie Ward. Music Jeremy Sams. Production designer John-Paul Kelly. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Exclusively at Pacific’s the Grove Stadium 14, 189 the Grove Drive (at 3rd Street), (323) 692-0829; the Mann Criterion 6, 1313 3rd St., Santa Monica, (310) 248-MANN #019; and the Landmark Westside Pavilion Cinemas, 10800 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 281-8223