Converting Conversions

The first part of this essay explored the 1955 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair (1951). While this film version has its limitations, its original scenes that extend beyond what the novel gives us—Sarah’s journal and Bendrix’s memories—provide an opportunity to experience Sarah’s conversion more personally. Now, we shift our focus toward Bendrix and the 1999 adaptation. While, cinematically speaking, this version is at times more successful, it also sometimes seems to miss the mark completely. If the former gives more substance to Sarah’s conversion, the latter gives raw humanity to Bendrix’s. This is largely due to Ralph Fiennes’s superb acting, but Neil Jordan (who both directed and wrote the screenplay) also finds interesting ways to reimagine the later stages of the story. Admittedly, much of his re-writing misses the deeper spiritual layers of Sarah’s struggle toward faith and romanticizes the story in a way sometimes blatantly counter to the original text. Still, by focusing intensely on Bendrix and his encounters with the other male characters, an intimate portrait of the narrator’s conflict emerges that is often moving. 

Unlike its review for the 1955 adaptation, the New York Times praised the 1999 film when it came out—particularly the director’s approach: “To a more conventional filmmaker, there might be little to recommend a mid-1940s period piece that hinges on matters of religious faith. But for [Jordan], this is one more intelligent, brooding love story with a secret twist, and he easily carries the viewer along for the ride.” Although the reviewer (Janet Maslin) also points out a “sophistication” and “complexity” in this adaptation’s “deeply stirring and elegantly concise” treatment of the source text, there is still a sense in which she evaluates the film on the merits of its tragi-romantic love story rather than on its treatment of religious experience. The same can be said for Roger Ebert, whose review focused primarily on how “dreary” and “glum” it is, giving the conclusion this cynical assessment: “If the movie were not so downbeat and its literary pedigree so distinguished, the resolution would be soap opera. The outcome, indeed, would be right at home on a religious cable station (although the sex would have to be handled more disapprovingly).” While it is hard to disagree with his charge of “soap opera” at certain points in this film, his apparent disdain for spirituality implies a similar lack of capacity for religious exploration as we saw in Crowther’s review of the 1955 adaptation. Interestingly, these reviews commit the same sin against Sarah as Bendrix and Henry: failing to see her for who she really was and wanted to be.

To better understand how this happened, we can look more closely at the 1999 adaptation. Fiennes was the perfect person for this role, and he plays Bendrix as a simultaneously understated and desperate man struggling to recapture the love of his life. While a close reading of the novel reveals a reflective Bendrix who at least wants to consider how he may have been wrong (at one point he says of Sarah, for instance, “She had so much more capacity for love than I had”), Fiennes, under the direction of Jordan, brings Bendrix’s impassioned resistance to the foreground. In the process, we experience quite viscerally the depths of Bendrix’s love, jealousy, and fear of falling into a similar pit of belief that he believes led to Sarah’s death. Yet, noting this shift in tone is not to say that the Bendrix we encounter in 1999 is less moving or powerful. Instead, we get to limp along with Bendrix as it happens: chasing Sarah across the Common in the rain, berating the priest who claimed to know Sarah better than he did, playfully teasing Parkis (the quirky, though dignified, private detective Bendrix hires to investigate Sarah’s new “affair”). Jordan wisely chooses to keep the sequence of the novel intact, opening with Henry’s concerns about Sarah and following Bendrix’s gradual revelations of their relationship in tandem with Parkis’s private detective work. In this way, the film offers a fairly straightforward translation of many parts of the film. However, by taking creative liberties with many of the later plot elements and dwelling on rather explicit love scenes, this version plunges viewers into the whole affair in a way that forces us to reconsider Bendrix’s story afresh.

In the novel, we witness a more subtle process of conversion toward belief through Bendrix’s often understated commentary. For example, he says to Smythe (the atheist pastor-figure who attempts to de-convert Sarah) when they meet for the first time, “I believe in nothing as it is. Except now and then.” The film, however, effectively dramatizes his conversion by making Bendrix’s resistance to accepting the work of God in his life increasingly vivid as the movie progresses. He continually turns inward while obsessing over Sarah, convincing himself that all he needs for happiness is her. We see this play out in both the novel and the film, but there are various minor differences in the movie that have a cumulative effect in moving us ever more sharply into Bendrix’s point of view. Immediately after the bombing that ends their affair, for instance, Jordan makes a script change that seems to reflect the self-absorption that obscures Bendrix’s ability to love Sarah fully. As he and Sarah are about to separate, Sarah says, “People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing him?” Bendrix replies, “That’s not my [as opposed to “our” in the novel] kind of love.” So intent is this film on capturing Bendrix’s self-focused love that small changes like this can offer meaningful implications about the ways in which Bendrix was consumed by this relationship.

Perhaps the strongest change in this adaptation that brings greater sharpness to Bendrix’s struggle is Jordan’s portrayal of the other male characters. Instead of making Smythe an impassioned rationalist trying to “de-convert” Sarah, he chooses to replace this character with a priest (still named Smythe) who fills the dual roles of being Sarah’s new secret confidante and the priest who later visits Henry to discuss funeral arrangements after Sarah’s death. By distilling the figure of “rival suitor” into this singular Smythe the priest we get to watch Bendrix’s pain (masked in “hatred”) lash out dramatically as the tension builds ever more swiftly near the end. In other words, as opposed to Greene’s use of multiple male characters who continue to assert Sarah’s saintliness independently—giving the effect of piling on the evidence to corner Bendrix into belief—Jordan synthesizes these characters into a singular force that drives Bendrix to gather all his resources against Smythe all the more intently. Jordan also combines the priest’s two visits in the novel into one intense scene, where Henry, Smythe, and Bendrix form an uneasy triangle as Bendrix paces about the room in a fury. It gives viewers the sense that Bendrix is growing more afraid of the belief that seems to be chasing him as he resents this supposed God who took Sarah away from him. We hear his voice crack mid-shout; we see him sneer with particular disgust at Smythe’s protests; we almost forget that Henry, not Bendrix, was Sarah’s husband. Fiennes captures this grief translated through rage in ways that bring new life to the text despite its other factual “infidelities.”

The other glimpse of working toward salvation that we get more powerfully in this version is Bendrix’s growing relationship with Henry. Although it’s discussed in the novel, the 1999 adaptation extends the idea significantly. By deciding to make Sarah “terminal” with a few months left to live, the film pushes Henry to invite Bendrix to live with them together while Sarah is still alive, which consequently deepens their connection as they both care for her and support each other. They become and remain good friends, and it’s moving to watch their re-imagined conversations on the screen. When Henry first reveals to Bendrix that Sarah will die soon, Bendrix asks, “Are you at a loss, Henry?” When Henry responds, “I am, quite,” Bendrix places a comforting hand on his arm and squeezes it—a tender gesture that hints at the former lover’s growing ability to care for other people. This shift is also well expressed in the film’s change to Bendrix’s closing lines in the story. While keeping the dramatic “leave me alone forever” from the original text as the parting blow, just before that, Bendrix writes, “I have only one prayer left: dear God, forget about me. Look after her—and Henry.” Bendrix remains preoccupied with his grief—remains incapacitated to love as he wanted to love Sarah—but there are still echoes that love has left him changed. Belief has lodged into his heart for good whether he wants it there or not.

Having spent so much time reflecting on the positive, creative differences in these adaptations, it is worth briefly noting their clear shortcomings as well. Although both films demonstrate Sarah drawing toward love and, consequently, to God, they also unsurprisingly neglect the deeper religious elements of the source text. Both make her baptism a footnote at best and largely ignore her posthumous miracles aside from a brief, sentimental nod at the end of the 1999 version. While it is tempting to be cynical about these omissions, it may be more helpful to step back and think about what it means to make an adaptation. In his essay “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” film theorist Robert Stam describes adaptation as “translation” and discusses the ways that “art renews itself through creative mistranslation.” By listing what he sees as a “constellation of tropes” available to adaptation theory—“translation, reading, dialogization, cannibalization, transmutation, transfiguration, and signifying—each of which sheds light on a different dimension of adaptation,” Stam encourages viewers to consider the many possibilities available to us in approaching familiar stories through new forms of art. He continues, “For example, the trope of ‘reading’ of the source novel—a reading that is inevitably, partial, personal, and conjectural—suggests that just as any text can generate an infinity of readings, so any novel can generate any number of adaptations.”

This observation seems apt both in our growing understanding of Bendrix as narrator and as character in The End of the Affair; of Sarah as we try to observe her through multiple lenses; and of all the other men who saw true goodness in her as they were touched by her love. By taking this approach to other adaptations of different stories, we can continue to catch such “partial, personal, and conjectural” glimpses of other characters as their lives unfold. In the case of The End of the Affair, if we are open to other readings of this multi-layered love story, we can discover new elements of what it means to “fall into faith as one falls in love.”

 Casie Dodd lives in Arkansas with her husband and two children. Her writing has appeared in This Land, Dappled Things, and other publications.