Movie Review: "Elegy"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Back in the early 1980s, a new kind of movie hero appeared onscreen, a dashing international man of mystery pitted against historical bad guys. Now that the actor who played that role is in his sixties, there was some trepidation expressed in some quarters that he might be getting, as they say, too old for this shit. But now that the smoke has cleared, it seems clear that, yes, this has truly been the summer of Gandhi. Or at least of the actor who played him, Ben Kingsley. Things got off to an inauspicious start with the Mike Myers train wreck The Love Guru, where he made funny faces. More recently, he appeared in Brad Anderson's indie thriller Transsiberian, where he made with a funny accent. And in between, there was Jonathan Levine's The Wackness (also known as I Love the '90s: The Motion Picture), where he made out with an Olsen twin. (I forget which one--they do look alike, after all--but I'm guessing that it was whichever one was on Weeds. She seems to be the one with the wild-child gene.) Now Kingsley has a full-on starring role in Elegy. directed by the Spanish-born filmmaker Isabel Coixet from Nicholas Meyer's adaptation of the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal.

Kingsley plays David Kepesh, a New York literature professor and host of a Leonard Lopate-like radio talk show. (The novel marks Kepesh's third starring role in a Roth novel. He first appeared in the 1972 The Breast, which he narrates from his hospital bed after having metamorphosed into the 155-pound title character. After that, apparently, he got better.) Obsessing over his inability to fold in the face of "the tyranny of beauty" has always been Kepesh's thing, and this time the dictator with his heart (or any blood-pulsing organ) in her hand is Penelope Cruz, playing a student thirty years his junior who eases into a post-semester affair with the panting old thing. Actually, the biggest surprise of Elegy may be just how well Kingsley holds up his end of their steamy affair, especially in his bare-chested bedroom scenes. When Kingsley was a much younger man, he often had the reticent manner and the looks of someone who seemed to be killing time waiting to become as old as he felt. Now that he's 64, there's something commanding about him that goes beyond acting technique. I found the sexual attraction between him and Cruz convincing. Cruz herself is a different matter. Physically she embodies the concept of the tyranny of beauty just fine, but she still can't act with any authority in English, and Coixet makes her look kind of ridiculous by dressing her as if she were in her teens or early twenties (or as if she were a thirtyish woman acting out a premature midlife crisis, which doesn't seem to be the idea). In her shiny dark bangs and colorful East Village folk costume, she's the human equivalent of a Hello Kitty backpack.

Coixet--she made the deathwatch melodrama My Life without Me-- is not the world's most visually resourceful director, and here, telling a story that depends a lot on emotions that would be impossible to convey in words, she puts a lot of weight on Kingsley, shoving the camera in his face when he's alone in the frame and practically yelling, "Act!" (She and Meyer have also accommodated their star by making Kepesh a transplanted Englishman. This will come as news to Roth fans, but it's a relief to get to hear Kingsley caressing his dialogue in his own voice for a change.) The movie is worth seeing for his scenes with the other actors in the smallish cast: Patricia Clarkson as his semi-regular fuck buddy of the past twenty years, Peter Sarsgaard as his (embittered) son the doctor, and especially, and surprisingly, Dennis Hopper as his best friend, a bearded poet named George O'Hearn. Kingsley and Hopper may actually be a weirder pairing than Kingsley and Cruz, especially since this one works. I'd assumed that Hopper was perfectly content in his little rut, but he looks incredibly happy to get to be in a movie where he doesn't have to snort coke or get his thumbs scissored off or try to think up a new way to deliver the line "Fuck!" while wielding an Uzi, and he gives a fine, engaging performance that lends Kingsley solid back-up. (His wife is played by Deborah Harry, who, like Hopper, has aged a lot more gracefully than you might have thought possible: in profile, she looks as if she ought to be posing for her official portrait as First Lady of something.) And Ben Kingsley establishes himself as a formidable post-middle-age sex symbol for the literary appreciation set. It's a measure of just how formidable that he's got me trying to think up alternative terms for "old", since he looks as if he might conceivably be able to kick my ass.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 7

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

The hottest ticket at Sundance 2007 — for the increasingly desperate press, if not for the general public — was Hounddog, in which Dakota Fanning played a barefoot farm girl so desperate for tickets to see Elvis Presley that she was willing to strip naked and gyrate around à la The King, only to get brutally raped for her trouble. Many fewer journalists flocked to see this year's less sensationalistic Phoebe in Wonderland, starring Dakota's equally precocious younger sister Elle — which is a shame, since it's a much more interesting film, albeit somewhat muddled. Phoebe's dangerous obsession isn't Elvis but Alice: Her mother (Felicity Huffman) has been working for years on a Lewis Carroll dissertation, and Phoebe desperately wants the lead role in her grade school's production of Alice in Wonderland, to be directed — sort of — by a singularly bizarre new drama teacher (Patricia Clarkson). So badly does Phoebe want the part, in fact, that she devises an elaborate system of games and rituals designed to secure it for her. She paces the school hallway for hours, carefully avoiding any cracks in the floor. She hops up the stairs at her house, then hops down twice, backwards, then up again, then a half-turn, clapping, then repeat. She washes her hands again and again and again, until they bleed.

Writer-director Daniel Barnz plays a rather pointless game of keep-away with Phoebe's condition, which isn't named until the movie's final moments, but I'll respect his wishes. (I'm pretty sure it's two comorbid conditions, actually, though the script doesn't specify; if I tell you that she also shrugs her shoulders a lot and occasionally repeats other people's sentences, that should clinch it for the neuro-heads.) Barnz's goal here — quite an admirable one, in an after-school special kind of way — is to suggest that such conditions are only the extreme end of a continuum upon which we all reside. But he also wants to make a more general plea for tolerance, so we get a subplot about an effeminate little boy in Phoebe's class who wants to play the Red Queen in drag and is immediately labeled queer. And he also wants Clarkson's drama teacher to be one of those Dead Poets Society educational martyrs who encourage kids to chuck all rules and regs before being marched to the guillotine by some humorless authority figure (here, inexplicably, Campbell Scott, who can't do humorless with a gun to his head). And he also wants to beguile us with Gilliamesque fantasy sequences, at which he sucks, quite frankly. The main reason to see Phoebe in Wonderland is for yet another astonishing Fanning performance. How these little girls are able to summon such powerful reserves of fear and anguish and terror, I have no idea. I'm not really sure I want to know, to be honest.

The Screengrab : patricia clarkson

Movie Review: "Elegy"

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 7