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Verdict: A silky adaptation of Graham Greene's examination of passion and faith.

Details: Starring Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore and Stephen Rea. Directed by Neil Jordan. Rated R for scenes of strong sexuality. 1 hour, 49 minutes.

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Review: It's hard enough maintaining a romance without someone else interfering. It's especially tough if that someone else may be the creator of heaven and earth.

Director Neil Jordan's somber, velvety and often sensual adaptation of Graham Greene's novel "The End of the Affair" explores love both physical and spiritual. Considering the difficulty of conveying religious faith in film, he is surprisingly successful in depicting both kinds of passion. While the movie doesn't skimp on humid clinches and bared skin, it also summons up the intangible mysteries of sacrifice and devotion to a higher power.

When we first meet London novelist Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), he appears to have only one rival for the affections of Sarah (Julianne Moore): her devoted civil servant husband, Henry (Stephen Rea). Actually, Bendrix and Sarah's affair has ended two years before the movie's main story begins. It's the abruptness of its ending, during the bomb-rattled days of World War II, that obsesses Bendrix. Why did Sarah retreat to her marriage, just when their love had reached a new level of trust and a sense of inevitability?

Driven by this question, Bendrix begins this tale that he calls "a diary of hate." His bitter mood is mirrored by the London that Jordan shows us: perpetually gray and drenched with rain. It's during one of these late-night cloudbursts that Bendrix happens upon the unsuspecting Henry in the common separating their homes. There, when Henry admits that he suspects that Sarah is involved with a (new) lover, Bendrix sees a chance to insinuate himself back into the couple's lives. In an act of perverse "friendship," he hires a fastidious but bumbling private eye (the fine Ian Hart) to track down the man now keeping Sarah preoccupied.

"Jealousy is a terrible thing," Henry says at one point. "Affair" focuses on the power of that jealousy, which could be seen as the flip side of desire, a symbol of the failure of a lover to love selflessly. In contrast to Bendrix's neediness, Sarah assures him, "Love doesn't end just because we don't see each other." In other words, love and faith are very much the same for her.

Jordan, who adapted the script, delivers this theological-romantic mystery in ways that reflect the book. The movie slips back and forth in time, showing the lovers' first meeting, making love, eventually coming apart. The structure mirrors Bendrix's own mind, stuck perpetually between the past and the present. (The same time-shifting technique is used in the current "Snow Falling on Cedars," but there it seems more a director's trick than an organic way of telling the story.)

Jordan makes some slight changes to the novel. He invents a brief seaside idyll for the lovers, which gets the movie out of London's gloom; tweaks the identity of one minor character; and changes the nature of a possibly miraculous event to make it more cinematic. All his choices are sound. And he gives his stars several bedroom scenes, underscoring the lovers' sexuality and blowing the dust off the movie's period setting.

As Bendrix, Fiennes gives a performance of smoldering anger, recalling his work in "The English Patient." You can believe in both his passion and his refusal to accept love on anything but his own terms. He's a man willing to let his heart cut him adrift from this world, and possibly the next.

It's Moore's job to flesh out the trickiest of the three main roles. That's a challenge, since Sarah is ultimately Bendrix's fantasy projection, an icon and an enigma. But Moore makes her breathe. Possibly the actors' best scene is a tense lunch meeting, after Bendrix has come back into Sarah's life. Fiennes simmers with suppressed pain and rage, while Moore fights to keep her poise; it's a scene where what isn't said comes roaring out of their awkward silences and polite conversation.

Though Bendrix quips, "Goodness has so little fictional value," Rea demonstrates otherwise. As Henry, he invests a potentially bland role with a moving kind of decency. The strong performances are matched by a mournfully romantic score by Michael Nyman ("The Piano"), summoning up Bendrix's restlessness as he seeks an answer that he doesn't really want.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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