ShareThisThere always seems to be a shortage of good, mature movies for adults. And by "adult," we're not talking about porno films, but about movies that treat sex as both a natural part of human life and as just one part of that life.
There has also been a shortage of good movies based on the novels of one of America's best writers, Philip Roth. "Goodbye, Columbus" had its humorous moments, but the ribald "Portnoy's Complaint" didn't work at all and "The Human Stain" suffered from the miscasting of two fine actors -- Anthony Hopkins as a college professor who has always "passed" as a white man and hidden the fact that his mother was African-American; and Nicole Kidman, as an abused, working-class woman.
"Elegy," based on Roth's novella "The Dying Animal," is also about a middle-aged professor (played by Ben Kingsley) who gets involved with a considerably younger woman (Penelope Cruz), but this time the result is provocative and moving. Out this week on DVD (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $27.96, rated R), "Elegy" has been made with great sensitivity by Spanish director Isabel Coixet ("My Life Without Me," "The Secret Life of Words") and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, who wrote several of the "Star Trek" movies as well as "The Human Stain."
Kingsley's David Kepesh is a brilliant Columbia professor, an intellectual celebrity and a serial seducer of younger women -- usually students. He gets around the university's sexual-harassment code by only going after coeds who have completed his class. He sets his sights on a beautiful undergraduate, Consuela Castillo (Cruz), a woman in her mid-to-late 20s from a Cuban family. But instead of Consuela becoming just another conquest for Kepesh, whose usual methodology is to educate and mentor his young mistresses in matters of culture and sexuality, she begins to affect him as much as he does her.
A man who years ago left his wife and child for a life of sexual freedom and limited personal responsibility, Kepesh now finds himself feeling more deeply toward Consuela than he had ever imagined. He even begins to act with embarrassingly sophomoric jealousy toward her. In many ways, she's more mature than he is, and she sees in him a decency and vulnerability that he has long ago covered up by layers of charm, urbanity and, occasionally, cruelty.
Enriching the story are three fine actors giving first-rate performances.
Patricia Clarkson is perfect as a longtime sexual partner of Kepesh's, someone with whom he might have settled down years earlier, but did not. Dennis Hopper plays brilliantly against type as Kepesh's best friend and colleague, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who repeatedly and unremorsefully cheats on his wife (Deborah Harry). And Peter Sarsgaard, as Kepesh's son, a successful doctor, captures the unquenched resentment and hurt of a grown man still seething over his father's long-ago abandonment of his mother and himself and his father's continual detachment.
"Elegy" takes several dramatic turns, but at every step the authenticity of Kingsley and Cruz prevents the story from becoming obvious in its portrayal of a May-December romance. Kingsley, whose character narrates the story, brings his usual energetic intensity to his role as a man whose supreme intellectual confidence masks his insecurities, while Cruz delivers a performance that begins with her astonishing beauty but quickly turns into something much deeper than skin.
"Elegy" received mixed reviews upon its release last year, with most critics praising the actors' performances but some decrying the film as a fantasy for aging males, a "typical" Roth meditation on lust and aging. But that criticism grievously underestimates the depth of Roth's work. It fails to account for the richness of the story, its humor, its truth and the dynamism of Kingsley's powerful portrayal.
The DVD's bonus features include a disappointingly uninformative short feature, "The Poetry of 'Elegy,' " and a pedantic audio commentary from screenwriter Meyer, who dwells too long in explaining the differences between a novel and a film based on it.
(brucedancis(at)comcast.net.)
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