By all rights, Neil Jordan's new film, The End of the Affair, should be dazzling. So many of the pieces are in place--first-rate actors, a great wartime love story, a seasoned director (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire). But the inconsistently inspired director falters here, and what should percolate into a fine cinematic brew instead comes out as a disappointingly sludgy ode to what might have been a great work.

Adapted from a Graham Greene novel, the film certainly has an enviable pedigree; Greene's works have been made into outstanding movies, most notably the 1949 classic The Third Man. But with Affair, many of the problems can be traced back to the source material. Few contest Greene's virtuosity as a prose stylist, but there's a reason you probably haven't read The End of the Affair. It's a sour, neurotic little novel, and in many ways uniquely ill-suited to film adaptation.

The story is simple: In the last months of World War II, photogenic Brits Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) and Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore) embark on a torrid love affair. Sarah's husband Henry (Stephen Rea), a virtually impotent workaholic, gradually develops a friendship with handsome novelist Bendrix as the latter becomes increasingly obsessed with the illicit romance. Without warning, Sarah ends the relationship, crushing Bendrix; when we meet him, two years later, his bitterness has not diminished. When a chance meeting with Henry reawakens his barely submerged passion, he hires a private detective to follow his beloved and discover why she left him so abruptly.

It sounds as though all of the elements for a great romance/mystery are here, and for the first 20 minutes of the film, they are. Drenched in period atmosphere (due in no small part to the smoky score by Michael Nyman and Roger Pratt's dark, haunting photography), the film seduces the viewer with Fiennes' bloodshot intensity and Jordan's creative visual ideas. One shot in particular stands out from this first act: the image of a lonely Bendrix mounting a spiral staircase intercut with flashbacks of Sarah seductively leading him up the same stairs to their conjugal hideaway. The changes in lighting and focus are so subtle that the two times blend for the viewer as they do for Bendrix, and for a moment the audience is truly lost within its main character.

Moments such as these, however, are too scarce in a film that ends up expending most of its energy working through two major structural problems: an increasingly absurd plot and the difficulties of adapting a novel that consists primarily of first person interior narration. Jordan unadvisedly takes a literal approach here, employing the most drab, extensive set of voiceovers since the awful pre-director's cut version of Blade Runner. (Haven't seen it? Don't.) Fiennes, a subtle actor, is forced to explicitly identify every emotional state his character enters. Does Bendrix really need to tell us how "tortured" he feels when we can see for ourselves a miserable Fiennes gulping whiskey and slamming his fist onto a table with rage?

If the audience is overexposed to Bendrix, the opposite is true of Sarah. Even after a cumbersome transition section built around her voice-overs, the character is only hazily defined. Rather than attempting to tackle the book's complicated explanation of Sarah's take on her marriage and affair, Jordan chooses not to address the matter at all, leaving the viewer (and the woefully underutilized Moore) in the lurch.

The central relationship of the film is similarly troubled. Bendrix and Sarah assure each other (and the viewer) that their relationship is built around a profound love. But we barely even see them chat; the film's only way of investigating the seriousness of the relationship is via the physical act of love--and in this sense, The End of the Affair has love to spare. Rarely in an American film has sex been depicted with such frankness and frequency. Crotches are grabbed, hips are rhythmically thrust and even Ralph's pale, well-formed bottom makes an extended appearance. But something is amiss in these scenes--the sex is cold and mechanical, and feels overly choreographed. Since Jordan gives us little else to define the relationship by, it's difficult to feel emotionally involved in the film's later, tragic scenes. There's an interesting subtext in the novel regarding the oft-blurred line between physical and emotional love, but the film just zeroes in on the copulation and leaves the rest to the imagination. Call me reactionary, but it seems a little backward.

Another stumbling block is the small scale of the production. Barely a face graces the screen that does not belong to one of the three main characters, and the bulk of the film was shot on just a few sets, adding to the sense of claustrophobia. The smallness of the movie goes beyond that, though--in what is intended to be a pivotal scene, Bendrix rushes out of his house to catch Sarah before she leaves town. But instead of sprinting down the streets in a romantic dash to his beloved, he just trots across a little patch of greenery in time to intercept her. It couldn't be more than 20 yards; Fiennes barely musses his hair. What's romantic about that?

The strengths of the film are largely those of its great character actors. Stephen Rea, a Jordan veteran (this is his eighth film with the director), turns in a heartfelt and understated performance as Henry. Rather than playing up to traditional jilted husband clichs, Rea imbues the character with a sad dignity that ends up far more affecting than the lovers' travails. As Parkis, the detective hired by Bendrix to follow Sarah, the enormously underrated British actor Ian Hart steals every scene he's in. His Parkis is bumbling and a bit obsequious, but somehow a pervasive pathos in the performance overwhelms the lesser comic effect.

Neil Jordan is not a consistent director, but good or bad, his work is never ordinary. Though his last film, the turgid and painfully overwrought In Dreams, was a disaster, there have always been elements of greatness embedded in his work, and The End of the Affair is no exception. It's unfortunate that the film, like many others in the Jordan oeuvre, adds up to less than the sum of its parts.