Then, a horrible death, which resigns Joe to a life of could-have-beens and should-have-happends, a ritual of grief that’s speciously amplified by cloying callbacks to the hot air balloon accident and further distorted when Jed (Rhys Ifans), who’s similarly linked to the death in the field, begins to stalk the author. A hot air balloon hauntingly glides into frame and the life of a young boy literally dangles in the hands of a group of strangers. The opening scene, an evocation of untainted bliss between a bestselling author, Joe (Daniel Craig), and his sculptor girlfriend, Claire (a wasted Samantha Morton), in an empty field, is a triumph. Director Roger Michell understands the questions that McEwan raises about love in his novel Enduring Love, but not unlike his film The Mother, the director shoots the thing like a soulless spread for Modern Living. From The Cement Garden to his brilliant Atonement, Ian McEwan picks at the wounds left by terrible events, linking death to desire in ways that both challenge the nature of art and illuminate the difficulties of modern living.
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