When I was in the second grade, my
teacher read my class a book titled The
True Story of the Three Little Pigs. More or less, the book tried to show
that there are two sides to every story, and that the perspective it is being
told from can completely change the way people view it. The reason I bring this
up is because I think the greatest strength in The End of The Affair is its use of perspective throughout the
film. It opens with Bendrix’s account of the story, and the ominous opening
line: “This is a diary of hate.” Through this telling of the story, the film
was able to incorporate flashbacks and scenes without too much difficulty.
However, Bendrix’s perspective also forces the viewers to view things the way
that he saw them. Therefore, at the beginning of the film, Sarah seems like a
bad person. When the beginning of the story is told through Bendrix’s eyes, all
that we can know is that Sarah cheated on her husband, Henry, with Bendrix,
left Bendrix for no good reason (and in fact wished that Bendrix was dead), and
persisted cheating on Henry. However, after Bendrix acquires Sarah’s diary, we
get to relive everything through her eyes. Sarah never really
loved Henry, as he was never a good husband to her. However, she did truly love
Bendrix, and never wanted to stop loving him. The only reason that she stopped
was because she made a deal with God after Bendrix was nearly killed by a bomb.
If God allowed Bendrix to live, she would stop seeing him. When he lived, she
left him. This makes Bendrix and Henry seem like the bad guys. After getting
that perspective, though, Henry gets to present his point. When he reveals that
he never really wanted to know if Sarah was cheating on him, was not jealous,
and interrupts her and Bendrix only to tell her that her illness was killing
her, he is revealed to actually be a very good person. This leaves Bendrix as
the loser at the end of the film, and after seeing every perspective, we come
back to him as a hating, angry man.
This scene explores many themes
that are present throughout the film, but the line I want to focus on right now
is when the priest says, “You are a good hater.” This illustrates Bendrix’s
relationships with almost every major character in the movie. To everybody
else, his jealousy and anger comes off as hatred. Even he himself can only feel
hatred. Though he does not include himself in the list of things and people he
hates, the priest is right when he says that Bendrix is in pain. Bendrix had
actually turned this priest away before Sarah died, so it is his fault that she
will not have a Catholic funeral. Bendrix had formerly come to terms with how
he felt about Henry. He realized that Henry was content with how things had
turned out, and, even though he loved Sarah, only wanted what was best for her.
However, out of pure anger he claims that he now hates Henry, as if the reason
he and Sarah never ended up together was completely Henry’s fault. He also
hates God (whom Sarah had come to terms with before her death). However, this
scene also reveals a lot about Bendrix and Sarah’s relationship. Bendrix,
indeed, was a good hater. He was a jealous and angry man. However, his jealousy
always turned into love for Sarah. To her, the jealousy was a good thing, as it
kept them together. With her gone, all that was left for Bendrix was hate.
I found a lot of the references to
Catholicism and God very reminiscent of Greene’s other works. The above link is
to a video of the last scene of the movie. In it, Bendrix reveals that he has
come to believe in God. He feels that God used his hatred against him, to force
him to believe. Even though Greene was Catholic, we’ve seen that he is not
afraid to show the darker side of religion and God. I also found some
similarities to the whiskey priest from The
Power and The Glory. In the first scene that I posted, the priest
recognizes Sarah as worthy of a Catholic burial. He says that the Church
recognized the baptism of desire. Even though she was definitely not the “bad
guy” at the end of the film, she was not, by any stretch, a good Catholic. She
cheated on her husband and did not believe in God for most of her life.
However, she came to terms with herself and her faith by the time she died.
Despite bearing some resentment towards God, she came to believe in miracles,
and she wanted to be a good person. Similarly, the whiskey priest did not
really believe in a lot of things that he was supposed to, and was not a
typical priest. However, he did his best to come to peace with himself.
Overall, I thought the movie started out a little slow, and I'm not particularly a fan of romance movies, but I'd still highly recommend this movie. I think it got a lot better as it went along, and, though sometimes hard to follow with some of the flashbacks, it really came together at the end.
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