THE NOVELIST & THE DIRECTOR : In his way, Jordan was faithful to Greene.

We've just completed Lent, for many of us a reminder of how feeble the will can be. In my case, broken promises also bring to mind director Neil Jordan's recent version of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, a movie many found disturbingly weak-willed and unfaithful to its source.

The controversy over The End of the Affair concerns Jordan's decision to change the ending of the novel in a way that would seem to contradict the dramatic and religious logic of Greene's story. In the novel and film, Sarah Miles, an adulterous wife, makes a promise to God that if her dead lover, Maurice Bendrix, is brought back to life--he appears to have been killed during a German bombing raid--she will "give him up forever." In the book, Sarah goes to her grave having kept her promise to God, and her determination to give up sexual love and consolation for a spiritual relationship becomes the source of miraculous interventions after her death. However, in Jordan's film, Sarah breaks her vow and is reunited, if only for a few days, with her lover.

Critics charge that the hard edge of Greene's theological drama--his portrait of heroic sanctity and unblinking insistence on what God demands from us--is vitiated in the film. "The force of Sarah's character, her fate (and that of the two men in her life), and the central irony and piteousness of the story, all flow from Sarah's determination to keep her promise," wrote Commonweal's Richard Alleva (January 28, 2000). Sarah's broken vow "finally dissolves Graham Greene's central premise and relieves Sarah of her theological dilemma. And without that dilemma, the story ultimately doesn't make sense." The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann (December 27, 1999) was even more severe, accusing Jordan of "ravaging the spiritual elements of the novel." "If Jordan felt obliged to squeeze and to distort--almost to apologize--for the religious theme, why bother with the book?" he concluded.

Alleva and Kauffmann are right; Jordan plays havoc with the carefully orchestrated plot and themes of Greene's novel. Still, I don't think Jordan is as willfully destructive of Greene's intentions as it may seem at first. Sarah's later broken vow is not, after all, out of character. Moreover, Jordan's decision directs our attention to some of the more enigmatic aspects of Greene's fevered and heterodox religious vision: that our lives take a path not of our own choosing and that along that path we are forever encountering God in the most unexpected guises--in the midst of adultery and other deceptions, for example. As Sarah confides to her diary in the novel: "Did I ever love Maurice as much as I love You? Or was it really You I loved all the time? Did I touch You when I touched him? Could I have touched You if I hadn't touched him first, touched him as I never touched Henry, anybody."

God's inscrutability and omniscience, the mystery of belief, and the transitory nature of human love are Greene's abiding concerns. The End of the Affair is not a story about Sarah's moral striving or the penalty exacted for violating the Sixth Commandment. For Greene, God's unfathomable grace is as promiscuous as his lovers, while God's mercy, as Sarah tells us, "sometimes looks like punishment."

The direction in which Jordan takes the story--away from attributing Sarah's miracles to her steadfastness in chastity--is rooted in the novel. Greene's Sarah all but falters many times. "I'm not at peace any more," she writes in her diary. "I just want him like I used to in the old days.... I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. "

Jordan seems to have imaginatively expanded on this and similar passages. Because so much of the novel takes place in Maurice's head and is revealed in Sarah's diary, neither of which is easy to translate to the screen, the director/ screenwriter needed to rearrange and add to the dramatic furniture of the book. He devised a way to keep Sarah on stage: he brings the lovers together again and invents a deathbed scene. Instead of Bendrix reading from the diary, this scene allows Sarah to speak what are perhaps the crucial lines in the novel. "I've caught belief like a disease," she tells her lover. "I've fallen into belief like I fell into love. I've never loved before as I love you, and I've never believed in anything before as I believe now....I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven't any fight left."

Jordan puts the pieces of his reconstructed ending together carefully. Just before going back to Bendrix, Sarah confesses that she is "too weak" to keep any of her promises--either to her husband or to God. In short, Bendrix compels her to return and Sarah merely accedes to his wishes. Jordan then emphasizes the futility of Sarah's moral resolutions by having her make yet another promise--to marry Bendrix. She can't keep that vow either--God won't let her. She's dying. The same sort of move is found in the novel. There, Sarah also decides to return to Bendrix. "I'm going to make him happy, that's my second vow, God, and stop me if you can, stop me if you can," she writes. But her decision is to no avail. God stops her, Greene would have us believe, by having her husband plead with her to stay.

The paradoxical strength of Sarah's weakness, manifest in her receptivity to God, is the most perplexing yet compelling aspect of her personality. "I can't do anything of myself," Greene has her confess as she makes her deal for Bendrix's life. "Make me believe." Her waywardness is inseparable from her profound sense that God has taken hold of her life, that God "knew what I would do before I did"--knew that she would commit adultery, renounce her adultery, and (at least in Jordan's version) sin yet again. This strong sense of predestination is a characteristic element in Greene's work and explains much of its antinomian flavor. "If he exists, then he put the thought of this vow into my mind and I hate him for it," Sarah says in the novel.

Given the pervasive sense of predestination in the novel, I would argue that Sarah's broken vow in Jordan's film is a plausible variation on Greene's design. "One gets so tired of people saying that my novels are about Good and Evil," Greene noted. "They are not about Good and Evil, but about human beings....I do not wish to judge any of my characters." In The End of the Affair, Greene is intent on showing how the fierce passions that bring us to faith are not strictly moral. Greene's God will work his will through our weakness or our strength, our faith or our disbelief, our love or even our hate. He is not a set of ideas, but a felt presence. This seeming amorality is the great paradox of Greene's "religious" novels. If God has made us in his own image, Bendrix speculates in the novel, he may be as "twisted as we humans are." Greene's "twisted" God is very much alive in Jordan's movie. He is as implacable in giving life as he is in taking it; as responsible for the exhilaration of sexual passion as he is for its diminution and loss. Jordan puts that God on screen.

Both Greene and Jordan tell us that God reveals his infinite "cunning" by using the passion of illicit sex to bring Sarah and perhaps even Bendrix to belief. This idea of God's cunning or doubleness also explains why the miracle Sarah is held responsible for at the end of the movie--the curing of a child's facial disfigurement--is so affecting. Earlier Sarah had asked, "What kind of a God would do such a thing to a child?" The answer, of course, is the same God who makes for any of us an "ordinary corrupt human love" that must end, who gives us life only to take it back. It is not the cheap stagecraft of removing the boy's disfigurement that startles. What startles is how, at the moment Bendrix's hatred for God reaches an apex at Sarah's cremation, Jordan focuses our attention on the everyday miracle of an ordinary child's face, seen as if for the first time. It is a face forever marked by the cruelly loving hand of its creator, and made all the more human by the transitory nature of its beauty.

Paul Baumann is Commonweal's executive editor.