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Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz are an unconvincing couple in Elegy |
Elegy - Love affair’s merely academic for professor Kingsley
ELEGY
Directed by Isabel Coixet
Certificate 15
THE simple problem with this Philip Roth adaptation, starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz, is it’s all rather boring.
The story tells of a later-life crisis of literature professor and media darling David Kepesh (Kingsley) and his infatuation with a beautiful student.
Lacking the punch of David Mamet’s Oleanna and offering a slightly preposterous relationship between the pair as the basis for the story, Elegy drags you through the love life of two underdeveloped characters whose attraction to each other is so shallow it deserves to be beached after the first date.
Kingsley’s character falls in love and then spends his time hating every minute of it. Yet he deserves no sympathy. It’s not because of his previously selfish behaviour (the fact he walked out on his family is hammered home over and over again), it is because, although he is meant to be hugely sophisticated, he finds no joy in the knowledge he possesses.
He comes over as someone who simply reads books so he can spout off about them in expensive restaurants: there is no eye for the beauty of art, just a wholesale hoovering up of cultural pursuits, which in this case includes one of his students.
With a cast who know what they are up to – Dennis Hopper joins Cruz and Kingsley – and based on Roth’s short story The Dying Animal, this could have been a contender.
The big themes are there, but sadly none is developed to any degree. Male and female sexuality scores highly on the think-list – our professor is 30 years older than his girlfriend, and he’s scared to meet the folks as he thinks they’ll whisper “pervert”.
We are also supposed to wonder if beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Our prof starts a lecture by explaining that if you read War and Peace today and then again in 10 years’ time, the book will be completely different because you have changed and it’s your interpretation that matters.
Death raises its head regularly, as do father and son relationships.
But so much is left unsaid. The characters are not given time off from drinking scotch in dimly lit sitting rooms for you to get to know them. It’s hard to decide whether it’s a clever trick by director Coixet to make you ponder as you leave the cinema what this film is actually all about, or a horrendous oversight that smacks of sloppy storytelling.
To cap off the whole air of hit-and-miss tale-telling, there are a number of one-liners: “When you make love to a woman, you get revenge for all the things that have defeated you in life”; “You have got to worry less about growing old and more about growing up”; “Are you happy, serial tom-catting?”
These snippets of squash court advice lessen any sympathy you may feel for the rapidly ageing Professor Kepesh. |
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