DECEMBER 28, 1999:
It's traditional that a deal with the Devil can be broken -- but a bargain with
God is for good. So goes the moral of Graham Greene's crankiest novel, The
End of the Affair. Sourly autobiographical, it wallows in bad faith; though
taking the part of the Devil's advocate, its narrator -- embittered Greene
stand-in Maurice Bendrix -- in effect is offering a polarized catechism, a
litany of anti-God denunciations that if held up to a mirror read the
opposite.

The novel's obsessive, meditative, even whiny style and substance are a
challenge for the screen -- the one previous adaptation, Edward Dmytryk's in
1955, was a dud. Maybe because the theme of unattainable love is close to his
heart, as seen in Mona Lisa, The Miracle, and The Crying
Game, or maybe because he saw it asa close-up of the typewriter keys hammering said
lines into a sheet of paper. But hate is not as big a problem with Maurice as
perception. Can one love or be loved when unseeing or unseen?

The question bugs him because he has by chance fallen in love with Sarah (a
pale Julianne Moore, who will grow paler still), the wife of Henry (Stephen
Rea, paying for his sins in Guinevere by playing an ineffectual prig), a
government minister whom Maurice is researching for a novel he's writing. It's
London on the eve of World War II and everyone is keyed up, so after his first
meeting with Sarah at a party, Maurice takes her to a film adaptation of one of
his own novels (a self-reflexive motif that goes nowhere), feeds her onions,
takes her home, and