Elegy (2008)
Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal is a trim 150 pages, but it plays longer – you feel as if you’ve lived and fought with it; with the aging, egotistical man who spends the length of the book ranting and ranting and ranting. The man is a cultural critic, and he uses his honed faculties as a weapon and permit for self-absorption. A womanizer up in his years, the critic seethes with backhanded need and bitterness and regret dressed as entitlement that’s still, underneath, actual entitlement, which eventually gives way to terror. The Dying Animal is primarily the critic’s dissertation on a former lover, a much younger Cuban woman who, throughout the narrative, remains distressingly vague – her humanity is the critic’s preconceptions of her youth and elusive beauty. The Dying Animal is a May-December romance torn apart, the pieces lying on the sidewalk. Roth’s novel is startlingly angry, passionate, dirty and alive – his words trip on one another, sidetracking from rationalization to rationalization – reveling, driving to penetrate… what? That’s not so certain, though it has something to do with sex as anesthetic for mortality, but that sounds clichéd, and undersells what The Dying Animal ultimately achieves. Roth redeems and transcends summary with ambiguity and clear-headedness. Roth eventually gets to something true of most all of us – that we dodge death through clichés, but he does so in a way that’s life affirming without being “life affirming”, he affirms life by refusing to boil it down. The ending is haunting – faced with the collapse of his false idol, the critic considers fleeing, he’s too old, too deeply entrenched in his narcotics, to allow decency to interfere with illusion. The novel is somehow self-absorbed – enthralled with Roth’s image – and tender, it’s a magic trick.
Reverse that and you have Isabel Coixet’s adaptation, Elegy. The title change is honest at least, this picture, like the Roth book-to-film The Human Stain, is another production that mistakes reverence for fidelity. The danger with Roth, as with other writers of comparable stature, is that his greatness seems to constipate filmmakers; they don’t wish to offend him, which may be exactly what he wants. Coixet stages the picture in that fine, false, consciously blocked Oscar way, and the performances are, largely, as good as they can be, but Elegy is conventional, and the characters are types. These types worked in the Roth novel because he painted them ironically, but Elegy is just another love story. That, in itself, would be ok, but why interfere with Roth’s work for the sake of formula? I was just bored for an hour or so, but near the end I was working toward offense – the ending endorses the platitudes the novel dismantled.
The good news: Ben Kingsley continues to prove he’s a stronger, more forceful actor in mediocre dramas or genre pictures – he’s an embodiment of our country’s obsession with age and extending potency (making him ideal for a real stab at this material). Once an on-screen saint, Kingsley has allowed advancing age to free him of his self-consciousness. Kingsley – taut, sharp, with a sly, lacerating sense of humor, has an ease that women may wish more men had, as well as a vigor and unpredictability associated with youth - the best of several worlds. Kingsley carries his years of off-and-on acclaim with him in Elegy, he has a baggage that compliments the part in clipped, exciting ways - managing to cut the sentiment in places. Kingsley nearly saves two nowhere strands – strained relationships with an old lover (Patricia Clarkson) and son (Peter Saarsgard). Saarsgard has nothing to work with, he’s a flat limp noodle, but Clarkson is a more of a waste. A once interesting actress, Clarkson is falling into a trap – as I’ve said before the Julianne Moore syndrome - of turning to formula misery in performance after performance. The former lover had a few of the strongest passages in The Dying Animal, but Clarkson doesn’t project the stung fading beauty that lent the moments their power – she’s too self-reliant, too cocooned and unwilling to challenge the part. Watching Clarkson’s second or third scene in the picture, I wanted desperately to get back to Penélope Cruz –
- who doesn’t have much either. Cruz, sadly, after such wonderful work in Volver and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is back to the sort of role that strangled her in earlier American pictures. Cruz is a playing an ideal – a flawed man’s path to redemption, and that’s a hoary old bit of bullshit that’s all but unplayable. It’s admirable that Cruz gets as far as she does, but she isn’t allowed the fire that Roth gave the character – and so the shock of the ending is lost. The character, facing death, loses her primal draw – but that’s missing in Elegy from the beginning. The movie is too polite – it doesn’t want to upset our boring talk of it during dinner afterwards. The picture has no blood, no messiness, no desperate primal thrust – the fucking here is the usual art-movie stuff, which means there’s nothing. The arguments, once inflamed and personal, are well-considered and flaccid here; the fevered concern of dying is also lost, because no one’s alive to begin with.
More good news: I enjoyed Dennis Hopper, his part is the screenplay’s most egregious voicing of subtext, but he exudes an unhurried warmth that I’ve never seen from him before, and his chemistry with Kingsley is the one truly pleasurable thing in the movie. And Hopper’s final moment has a faint whisper of the source material – he’s a man lost and humbled – facing something that could be nothing masked as everything, or vice versa.
October 5th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Very nice review, Chuck. My review from a month back drew different conclusions, as I thought Cruz was perhaps the film’s best asset–but you’ve made many good points, though I’d contend that Cruz’s portrayal is more of a comment on the kinds of roles she took in earlier American features.
I also liked Clarkson, and her character, but found Sarsgaard and to a lesser extent Hopper to be both wasted, and considered their characters to be pointless diversions (Sarsgaard, especially; Hopper’s role becomes more grating when the film contends that his role should be more important than it seemed more comfortable being).
October 7th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Excellent review Chuck–very observant and meticulously examined. I didn’t think much of the film either, and the only difference we have here is that I didn’t rate Kingsley’s performance highly. But that’s no big deal, the concensus has gone both ways there. I liked Hopper as well, but I know Alexander found him grating. One of your strongest suits as a critic, is that you are very discerning. Kudos to you!
October 12th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Alexander - I thought the Cruz character was that sort of comment in the book, but the movie seemed to me to be taking the cliches at face value. Cruz is affecting, but I thought she was limited by the picture. I think we more or less agree on the other supporting performances, Hopper has little to work with, but he haunted me nonetheless, and I hope he continues to get work in less pay-the-bills films.
Thank you very much Sam.