In thinking about the plot of Roger Michell's Enduring Love, I keep coming back to the synopsis provided by Entertainment Weekly in their annual Fall Movie Preview:

Think The Talented Mr. Ripley with Phillip Seymour Hoffman replaced by a hot-air balloon.

That's not exactly accurate, but it's funny and the kind of plot description that does a film like Enduring Love quite a bit of service. It sends you into the theater without a single clue as to what the film might actually be about, and that cluelessness persists even as the film nears its climax.

I'll provide you with a slightly more comprehensible outline than Entertainment Weekly. The film begins with Joe (Daniel Craig) and Claire (Samantha Morton) enjoying a spring picnic in the beautiful English countryside. Joe's brought along a bottle of champagne and a ring, but before he can get to either their privacy is interrupted by a giant red hot air balloon, drifting dangerously close to the ground. There are shouts for assistance; Joe heeds them and discovers that a boy is in the basket, his father having lost control of the vehicle while trying to ground it.

Others rush to the aid of the boy, and shortly a handful of men are clinging to the balloon, nearly bringing it to the ground until a gust of wind buoys it up again. Everyone lets go, save for one -- one man, who clings to the edge of the basket as the balloon drifts higher and higher, the boy still helpless inside. Eventually, when the balloon sets down in a field some miles away, the boy is the only one still with it.

The entire hot air balloon sequence, as orchestrated by Michell, is one of those unsettling sequences that is tantamount to, say, having a rug pulled out from under you, leaving you standing barefoot on broken glass. The romantic interlude is so cruelly shattered, the hot air balloon such an insurmountable, elemental opponent and the resulting death such a shocking tragedy that it leaves one's nerves shattered and in a perfectly malleable state: a great state for an audience to be in, from a director's point of view. Through this all, we have the title of the film in mind, and wonder how this story will end up being about love.

Joe puts away the ring and he and Claire return to their jobs, she as an acclaimed sculptor, he as a philosophy professor at a local university. Joe, understandably, can't get the balloon accident out of his head. He regularly flashes back to the moment he let go of the basket, torturing himself with the possibility that had he held on, everyone would have walked away and had a good laugh over the whole incident. He tests out mathematical equations that might assuage his guilt, goes over the details with Claire again and again. Every slightly inflatable shape is suddenly very apparent to him, and one might compare his behavior to Richard Dreyfuss's in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, only with the aliens replaced by red balloons.

Other parallels could be made to Rosemary's Baby, which this film is frequently just as disturbing as (and without the benefit of the supernatural). It seems to be a remarkable portrait of a man coming undone in the head, but then there's the one thing I've neglected to mention: the rise in Joe's obsessive, paranoid qualities are directly related to the increase of his encounters with Jed (Rhys Ifans), a scraggly young man who was also present at the accident. He runs into Joe outside his house one day, asking him if he wouldn't mind sitting down for a chat. Joe assumes he wants to commiserate about the tragedy they witnessed, but Jed mutters something about a connection and insists that Joe already knows what he's talking about. Joe politely excuses himself, but later he runs into Jed again in the street. Then, in a bookstore, then a restaurant. Eventually, Joe awakens at night to see Jed sitting in the park across the street, smiling benignly, and all the while that title nags in the back of our head; what does this have to do with love? Certainly Joe's love with Claire does not seem to be enduring; she's put not so much by his strange behaviors as by his refusal to let her know what exactly has been eating at him.

The film's true theme presents itself rather suddenly at a certain point, a point at which it becomes clear that the promise of the first two thirds will not be met. I will not reveal what happens, of course, but it's a departure from the esoteric sensibilities that made everything that came before so provocative. It was at this point, too, that I remembered that the film was based on a bestselling thriller by Ian McEwan, for what seemed to be purely cinematic suddenly seemed very much an adaptation. There's an attempt at the very end to loosen the bow that's already tied things up too nicely, and I didn't leave the theater feeling tremendously disappointed; but had the film lived up to what it initially seems to be, it might have been a masterpiece (I realize there's a bit of a contradiction there, though, as I've previously asserted that what it seems to be is impossible to determine).

The cast made up of some of the best British talent not currently utilized by the Harry Potter series. Michell's worked with Daniel Craig (in The Mother) and Rhys Ifans (in Notting Hill), and it's always exciting to see a director challenge repertoire players in different ways, especially when they've been otherwise underused (you may remember Craig from Road To Perdition and Ifans from...well, from Notting Hill, although he's been in quite a few films since then). And Samantha Morton, of course, has since ceased to be a revelation and simply continues to be a sure thing; there's never a poor moment when she's on screen.

Michell himself is fast becoming one of the most fascinating and unpredictable of filmmakers. He first came to my attention with Notting Hill, which I think remains Julia Robert's best film, and a few years later directed the surprisingly great morality play, Changing Lanes. Enduring Love is his second film in 2004, following The Mother, and while this isn't as successful as that wrenching portrait, it's no less challenging or fearless in its look at things we generally prefer not to think about.