Elegy
A while back I wrote about Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal which has now been made into a film, titled Elegy. It was directed by Isabel Croixet and written by Nicholas Meyer, who also wrote an adaptation of another Roth novel, The Human Stain.
The film deals with a man coming to grips with aging, and of course this means having sex with much younger women. Ben Kingsley is David Kepesh, a literature professor and TV intellectual. We first see him on the Charlie Rose show, talking about the Puritan ancestry of America (he mentions that contemporary to Plymouth colony was one called Marymount, where hedonism was rampant, but Miles Standish chopped down their maypole and the new land was covered with a cloak of Puritanism). Kingsley's character is a sexual being, who was married once but calls it a mistake, and he has a sometime lover (Patricia Clarkson) who visits him every few weeks. But he still has roving eyes for his students, whom he seduces after he turns in their grades.
Enter Penelope Cruz as a young Cuban woman (she is made a few years older than she was in the book). She and Kingsley enter into an affair, but he finds himself more entranced by her than his usual conquest. His sounding board is a poet friend, Dennis Hopper, who advises him to break it off before it gets too serious, but Kingsley is too far gone. But he still can't take the normal steps to commitment, such as meeting her parents.
I liked the first part of this film, but by the end it had wriggled off the hook and escaped me. In the book David Kepesh is a complete cad, but Coixet and Meyer humanize him a bit more here, but at the same time make him less interesting. We hear a lot of his thoughts, but not the vile ones in the book. A scene in which Clarkson finds a tampon in his bathroom and accuses him of sleeping with other women, in which Kingsley lies his way out of it like a champ, has a softer fuzzier tone that the ruthlessness of the novel. The last third of the film is simply Kingsley acting the part of an old guy feeling sorry for himself, and that is not particularly compelling.
I did admire a good portion of the film, though. Cruz is almost one-eighty-degrees away from her performance as the batshit crazy femme fatale in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She is reserved, as a girl from a conservative Cuban family would be, but also sexy and with a firm resolve. And her long langourous scenes of nudity don't hurt. Hopper, in a role that is almost purely a plot function, manages to make his scenes sing, and Clarkson is good as well. Peter Sarsgaard has some nice moments as Kingsley's embittered son. The photography by Jean-Claude Larrieu provides some arresting images, particularly of a foggy seacoast and a brief but memorable shot of Bethesda Fountain in a snowstorm.
Ultimately I give his film a thumbs up with some serious reservations.
The film deals with a man coming to grips with aging, and of course this means having sex with much younger women. Ben Kingsley is David Kepesh, a literature professor and TV intellectual. We first see him on the Charlie Rose show, talking about the Puritan ancestry of America (he mentions that contemporary to Plymouth colony was one called Marymount, where hedonism was rampant, but Miles Standish chopped down their maypole and the new land was covered with a cloak of Puritanism). Kingsley's character is a sexual being, who was married once but calls it a mistake, and he has a sometime lover (Patricia Clarkson) who visits him every few weeks. But he still has roving eyes for his students, whom he seduces after he turns in their grades.
Enter Penelope Cruz as a young Cuban woman (she is made a few years older than she was in the book). She and Kingsley enter into an affair, but he finds himself more entranced by her than his usual conquest. His sounding board is a poet friend, Dennis Hopper, who advises him to break it off before it gets too serious, but Kingsley is too far gone. But he still can't take the normal steps to commitment, such as meeting her parents.
I liked the first part of this film, but by the end it had wriggled off the hook and escaped me. In the book David Kepesh is a complete cad, but Coixet and Meyer humanize him a bit more here, but at the same time make him less interesting. We hear a lot of his thoughts, but not the vile ones in the book. A scene in which Clarkson finds a tampon in his bathroom and accuses him of sleeping with other women, in which Kingsley lies his way out of it like a champ, has a softer fuzzier tone that the ruthlessness of the novel. The last third of the film is simply Kingsley acting the part of an old guy feeling sorry for himself, and that is not particularly compelling.
I did admire a good portion of the film, though. Cruz is almost one-eighty-degrees away from her performance as the batshit crazy femme fatale in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She is reserved, as a girl from a conservative Cuban family would be, but also sexy and with a firm resolve. And her long langourous scenes of nudity don't hurt. Hopper, in a role that is almost purely a plot function, manages to make his scenes sing, and Clarkson is good as well. Peter Sarsgaard has some nice moments as Kingsley's embittered son. The photography by Jean-Claude Larrieu provides some arresting images, particularly of a foggy seacoast and a brief but memorable shot of Bethesda Fountain in a snowstorm.
Ultimately I give his film a thumbs up with some serious reservations.
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