RasoirJ on Elegy

Elegy (2008) **
It’s hard to like a narcissist, and it’s hard to like a movie without a winning protagonist. Philip Roth’s short novel The Dying Animal, the source of this film, worked better than the movie. Roth has a way of putting a knife into conventional behavior and twisting it. His great virtue is to have his characters act out the politically incorrect, nasty truths of the human psyche that few among the thinking classes are willing to acknowledge.

So where does Elegy go wrong? Let’s begin with Ben Kingsley as the womanizing professor David Kepesh. Kepesh is a New York intellectual, the sort who writes reviews for the New Yorker, appears on Charlie Rose, and seduces the best-looking girls in his classes at the end of each term. As Sir Ben plays him, Kepesh’s main trick is a basilisk gaze of high-intensity attention that for this viewer very soon becomes wearing. Kingsley’s shaved skull and gnomic pronouncements suggest nothing so much as Gollum become a randy old dude. In short, the old boy needs to be much more charming if he is to win the love of his obsession, a little 24-year-old Cuban goddess embodied by Penelope Cruz.

At times with all its bare-chested rolling around in the sack, the movie resembles a face-off between the matted Brillo pad that is Kingsley’s chest these days versus the alabaster beauty of fair Penelope. Cruz is not asked to do much here except show off her exquisite breasts. While her boobs are sterling, she needs to be a deeper person to interest us. Kapesh’s buddy, a weathered poet played by Dennis Hopper, keeps telling him that “beautiful women are invisible.” Get it: no man can get beyond the boobs – er, make that beauty – to grasp the real woman underneath.

This must have seemed a promising project to Hollywood suits – lots of skin plus the edgy pairing of the youthful director Isabel Coixet, that old devil Roth, and Sir Ben to elevate the tone. What a combo. Somebody just forget to make the romantic couplings onscreen worth caring about.