Elegy

Elegy

By Jonathan Fisher, April 23rd, 2009



I have enormous admiration for Ben Kingsley. Whether he's smoking spliffs in The Wackness, radiating calmness in Gandhi or poetically shouting expletives in Sexy Beast, he always manages to bring a tinge of empathy to every character he plays. When he's on screen, I can't take my eyes off of him. In Elegy his character begins as a dirty slimeball and ends as an introspective, reflective and selfless man. That I didn't really notice the change throughout the film suggests just how good Kingsley is.

Kingsley plays David Kepesh, a professor of cultural criticism in New York City. A serial womaniser, and proud of it (he calls his lifestyle "emancipated masculinity"), David systematically attempts to seduce his students, but only after grades are given out and the semester is over, to prevent him from any trouble with the university's administrators. David tells us all of this in a matter-of-fact voice-over that lacks any introspection whatsoever. This is one sleazy old guy.

David's current target is Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz), a young, beautiful and intelligent Cuban-American who should probably know better than to go anywhere near David, but does anyway -- one thing that irked me about the movie was that it's a bit of a stretch to imagine someone like Consuela even considering a dalliance with someone as old, unattractive and proudly sleazy as David. David is initially happy enough just to get the chance to sleep with Consuela, but finds himself developing a strange thing called "affection" towards her. He is completely unprepared and unable to reconcile his feelings for Consuela when he's spent his entire life avoiding just this sort of relationship.

Patricia Clarkson plays Carolyn, a woman of about David's age who occasionally sleeps with him, but clearly has deeper feelings for him. Dennis Hopper plays David's best friend, who tries to hammer in mature advice to his friend over coffee, but is frustrated and David's responses to his advice. The film is based on a book by Phillip Roth, whose literature frequently features an older academic in a dalliance with a younger woman. Roth himself is an older academic, which begs the question -- are his books autobiographical, or fantasy?

Elegy is directed by Isabel Coixet, a Spanish director who is most famous for directing the heart-tugger My Life Without Me several years ago. That and this film are both deeply concerned with a character coming to terms with something that terrifies them, and both films rely heavily on the actor's performance for their effect. Coixet doesn't demonstrate unnecessary flair in her direction of Elegy, but her real strength as a director lies in performance extraction. Cruz, apart from oozing sensuality as Consuela, evokes maturity and heartbreak admirably. While it may surprise some that the 34-year-old actress was chosen to play a character in her early 20s, Cruz has the acting talent and the necessary maturity to make the role work.

One enormous theme in the film is age, its role in relationships and also its role in maturity. David tells his friend that he feels just as he did as a young man, even though he is now into his sixties. This contradiction between the inner workings of a human being and the exterior is enormously significant, as Consuela conveys maturity well beyond her years, and then has to reconcile with an unthinkable change to her physical self. A question many will think to themselves toward the end of the film is how could someone still radiant with so much beauty have something so terrible exist just under their skin?

I'll stop there, as I nearly gave away an important plot point with that last paragraph's final sentence. While Elegy had the potential to cross over into 'creepy' territory in its exploration of this relationship, the performances by Cruz and Kingsley just prevent it from disturbing. What is interesting about David's character is that the more we get to know him, the less he seems like a dirty old man and the more he seems like a wounded human being, with deep insecurities. He is convinced that Consuela will find a younger, more handsome and virile suitor, and why wouldn't he? David knows that he's a jerk just as much as we do. But gradually he changes, and Kingsley makes the change believable and, towards the end of the film, quite touching.