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starring: Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, Stephen Rea, Heather-Jay Jones, James Bolamdirected by: Neil Jordan
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9780767832489
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC
ISBN: 0767832485
Label: Sony Pictures
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Release Date: October 17, 2000
Running Time: 102 minutes
Sales Rank: 5914
Studio: Sony Pictures
Theatrical Release Date: 1999
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com essential review:
'This is a diary of hate,' pounds out novelist Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) on his typewriter as he recounts the lost love of his life in this spiritual memoir (based on Graham Greene's novel) with a startling twist. It's London 1946, and Maurice runs into his achingly dull school friend Henry (Stephen Rea with a perpetually gloomy hangdog expression). Their meeting is brittle, all small talk and chilly, mannered civility beautifully captured by director-screenwriter Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), and it only barely thaws when Henry suggests that his wife Sarah (the luminous Julianne Moore) may be having an affair. Maurice's mind reels back to his passionate affair with Sarah during the war years, which she abruptly broke off two years ago, and gripped with a jealousy that hasn't abated he hires a private detective (a mousy, marvelous Ian Hart) to shadow her movements. He prepares himself for the revelation of a rival, but instead finds a deeper, more profound secret: 'I tempted fate,' she writes in her diary, 'and fate accepted.'
Jordan's cool remove captures the unease beneath formal manners but never warms into intimacy during the scenes between the lovers, even while Fiennes and Moore almost explode in repressed emotions, their faces cracking under their masks of civility and their resolve shaking through jittery body language. There's more thought than feeling behind this collision of passion and spirituality, but it's a sincere, richly realized portrait of ennui and rage against God energized by brief moments of shattering drama. --Sean Axmaker
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Love! Hate! Straight faces!
Writer Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) and married Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore) had a love affair for several years until she abruptly ended it. Two years later, Maurice meets her husband who suspects she is carrying on with someone; Maurice hires a private investigator to follow her, and falls in love with Sarah again.
This is probably a tear-jerking, steamy, and sentimental love story but I just didn't feel it. Fiennes, Moore and Stephen Rea, as Sarah's husband, play 95% of their ... Read More
Rating:  - 'The end of the affair'
Wonderful movie, but then I was brought up in England during the era so it is very familiar in all aspects. Just adore Ralph Fiennes.
Rating:  - A terrible adaptation and performance
Not long ago I read Graham Greene's wonderful, "The End of the Affair". I was so impressed that I sought out a film version, and was again captivated with the 1955 production starring Van Johnson, Deborah Kerr, and Basil Rathbone. Loving the story and wanting more, I obtained the 1999 version starring Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, and Stephen Rea. What a disappointment. Typical modern Hollywood alteration and cheapening of a great story and truth.
If I may expand a bit, in the order ... Read More
Rating: - torrid romance set in war-ravaged london
This excellent movie -- released in 1999 and based on the slim novel by Graham Greene published in 1951 -- wholly baptizes contemporary viewers into the cultural context of a time and place that nowadays exists only in the memories of those who were of age during WWII.
But even those of us who for the first time encounter Greene's works (whether his novels or the several popular movies based on them) in the twenty-first century can thank God for these reality-saturated tales, which, so much ... Read More
Rating: - A Glacial look at English Blitz love
I purposely avoided this film when it was theatrically released.The opinions were too varied for me to care enough to see for myself.So, now that I own the DVD it was time. BURRRRRRR!!!! What a cold and repressed piece of film.It's hard to put into words exactly what was so disconnecting for me about "The End of the Affair";was it the detached performances of Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes who are supposed to be passionately and irretrievably in passionate lust for each other during the Blitz of London?;was ... Read More
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