Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers
The shocking opening of this psychological thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan, takes place in a field near London. The field, rimmed with trees, is very green, dotted with small flowers. A man and a woman walking with back-packs pause and sit down. It's evidently a picnic. As he gets out a bottle of champagne, she says, “This is bliss.” Somehow it all seems too idyllic, perhaps the colours too primary, to be true. In a second, literally out of the blue, bizarre reality crashes into the field in the shape of a huge, red, helium-filled balloon with a frightened little boy inside the basket and a man dragged by a rope shouting for help to control it against the gusty wind.
The picnicking man, Joe Rose (Daniel Craig) runs towards the balloon, as other men materialising from neighbouring parts of the field also run to converge on an event which will impact on their lives with the reverberating ripples of sudden, visceral tragedy. The film conveys the book's philosophical and existential questioning not so much by words as by silence. Suddenly lifted by the wind, five wide-eyed men hang by ropes under the basket of the balloon, with only the sound of the rising wind and the creaking of rope against wicker. It's a sudden, absurd contrast to their rapid response, their running and yelling and pulling frantically on the ropes. And then they drop through the air, one by one letting go of their rope, until only one man is left and the balloon climbs far too high for him to fall safely. Again, in silence and dread, each person watching waits for the inevitable.
Joe Rose, university lecturer and rationalist, believes love to be meaningless, "simply biology". Despite this, he is happy with Claire (Samantha Morton), a sculptor, and was about to propose marriage moments before the balloon tragedy. In the aftermath of the accident, where he seeks vainly to find some meaning in what happened, his relationship with Claire begins to self-destruct. In addition there is the very weird and increasingly annoying appearance of a man called Jed Parry (Rhys Ifans) who was one of the men in the field. Jed seems to be stalking Joe, constantly and elliptically referring to a relationship between them. Rhys Ifans' Jed is the apparent epitome of a benign nutter. His intensity off-set with a knowing, seeming-innocent smile and those hazy, mild, blue eyes, Jed pricks Joe's conscience about his part in the death of the last man, John Logan. In trying to rationalise this freak occurrence, Joe is already obsessed with the mystery of who let go first. If none of them had let go, no-one would have died.
The uneven tension in this mostly steady-paced (after the opening) drama is maintained by islands of conversation between Joe and Claire or between them and their married friends Robin (Bill Nighy) and Rachel (Susan Lynch) where they dissect the accident or ruminate on the nature of love, or by unexpected moments when Jed bobs up, much like a balloon in a swimming pool. Increasingly it appears that Joe is absenting himself, in the way of people in shock, from his relationships, and unravelling despite himself, in tune with the persistent strangeness of Jed. At these times the tension falters and the film itself becomes mildly annoying, in that one wonders why Joe does not deal more directly with both the issue Jed is hinting at, and with Jed's stalking. As a block to his being more pro-active, Joe's existential guilt fails to convince.
The sub-plot, involving the widow of John Logan (an agonised Helen McCrory), who has a few other preoccupations about her husband, is a further exploration of the main theme of love, and comes to an unexpected conclusion with a convergence at the end, as at the beginning, in the field where it all happened.
Despite some fluctuations in suspense, the last act and the coda especially (wait till the end of the credits) contain some spine-chilling surprises that one could not predict.
As a thriller this film has some utterly electric moments of stillness followed by one or two stalling, desultory banalities which add little. On the nature of love, the film seems rather too elusive and elliptical. Joe's premise of “simply biology” is patently nonsensical, especially in the face of Jed's obsession with him, but there is a failure to show the difference between love and compulsive, needy obsession. Claire's self-nominated inability to sculpt Joe's face because she is “too close” to see him objectively is more an undifferentiated merging with the love object than true love, which sees true and unconditionally accepts. There is no indication that this is resolved or simply glossed over. Joe and Claire's character arcs seem therefore somewhat incomplete. Robin and Rachel's love is a peripheral example, but doesn't show the mechanics of love that endures despite bizarre tragedies which fall from the sky.
Nevertheless, compelling acting from Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton gives a convincing portrayal of the vicissitudes of a relationship put into turmoil by external circumstances. Bill Nighy and Susan Lynch likewise give a solid domestic relationship warmth and incidental humour. Rhys Ifans is sensational as Jed, imposing more and more implacably on the film as it progresses.
Special Thanks: Movie-Vault
