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Elegy

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Isabel Coixet. Cast: Sir Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, Deborah Harry

 

Description: University lecturer and critic David Kepesh is blessed with an over-inflated ego and an appreciation for female students at the New York seat of learning where he holds sway with opinions on literary criticism. He beds several of the women in his class, while continuing a no-strings affair with businesswoman Carolyn, then regaling Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and friend George with his antics. David becomes smitten with Cuban-born graduate Consuela Castillo and plies her with his usual charm. However, he struggles to maintain his usual detachment from Consuela, exposing him to the slings and arrows of misfortune.

Country: US. 2008. 112mins

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Nothing like an old fool in Elegy

 

Lesson in love: Ben Kingsley plays Penelope Cruz's professor

Age gap: older man loses his barings over student

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Stop worrying about growing old and start worrying about growing up," says Dennis Hopper's poet to Ben Kingsley's wracked academic lion in this tale of older men falling for much younger women, which is adapted by Nicholas Meyer from Philip Roth's short novel, The Dying Animal.

The younger woman in this case is Consuela (Penelope Cruz), the daughter of Cuban émigrés. She is the student of David (Kingsley), a man who has hitherto prided himself on being able to seduce his women young and old without getting too involved and is now well and truly smitten.

David doesn't know what's happened to him but he gradually understands that there's a giant change taking place within. He is still capable of going on television and producing enough wit and wisdom to satisfy his fellow academics but his vulnerability grows when faced with Consuela and the inescapable fact that she might simply admire rather than love him.

She, on the other hand, takes everything as it comes, until she is forced by misfortune to plumb the depths of his love.

Made by the Spanish director Isabel Coixet and shot by Jean-Claude Larrieu, her regular collaborator, Elegy lays itself open to the charge that its story is essentially banal and its central character hardly worth the trouble of worrying about. It is a little too smooth for its own good. But Kingsley's carefully modulated performance succeeds in making us feel more sorry for him than we might have for Roth's original protagonist - even if David's obsessive regard for himself remains as apparent as it was in the novella.

There's nothing grandstanding about Kingsley's portrait but the quiet concentration of his playing is as impressive as anything he has given us since the quite different Sexy Beast.

Hopper, too, is surprisingly apt as George, David's poet friend, a part which for once doesn't call for the pyrotechnics we all know he can do so well. He gives advice but is himself quite willing to taking anything that comes along as far as sex is concerned. It is his theory that the more attractive a woman is, the more invisible the rest of her becomes.

Cruz is a little too long in the tooth to play a student but she has the required beauty to make it plausible that a selfconfident older man would lose his bearings over her. We are never quite sure that she is also in love but in the end she expects more from her teacher than he can easily give her. He can't reassure her that he would still be able to adore her if her body grew old and imperfect. And in that way, he's more honest with her than he is with himself.

Coixet's determination to take everything very seriously can make things appear a bit portentous but it usually helps the film. She is a director who watches her actors like a hawk and is clearly able to get the best out of them. Roth's irony, and his tendency towards misogyny, isn't apparent because this is a woman director at work. But his close observation of his characters remains and Coixet has more sympathy for them.

Some would contend that David deserves what he gets in the end. He has always avoided anything more than skin-deep intimacy and thus treats Carolyn, his furious regular squeeze (Patricia Clarkson), who knows exactly what he wants and what she can't give him, with cold-blooded off-handedness. It's a matter of keeping her in reserve, while he greedily feeds on Consuela.

But though we may dislike him, it is easy to watch Kingsley's performance as a man hoist by his own petard with some fascination. There go most men who throw away what they have for a younger version.

Coixet is clearly a substantial director, as her previous English-speaking films (Things I Never Told You and My Life Without You) have shown. However, whether in trying to reach out for a wider audience here she has diluted her talent in favour of a richer, more stylish surface is a matter for argument. The smoother this kind of film gets, the easier it is to think it.

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