Whatever happened to Philip Roth?

The Spanish woman director Isabel Coixet is responsible for this adaptation of a short novel by Philip Roth called The Dying Animal, about a 62-year-old professor of literature who beds a 24-year-old student. I asked a woman friend to watch this movie with me and she emailed back, "I have limited patience for old men's fantasies about affairs with young women. Roth is obsessed with this - so is Coetzee and some others." I went to see Elegy alone.

Certainly such things, "fantasies," if you will, which include sex, beauty, aging, male performance, seduction, and more sex, indeed are very much an obsession of Roth's. And the degree to which the egotism blocks out anything else that might make life worth living is stifling. How such concerns gibe with those of a Spanish lady director isn't certain, but judging by Coixet's previous My Life without Me, she is drawn to themes of terminal illness. Her involvement may explain the presence of Penelope Cruz playing Consuela, the young woman. The ubiquitous Ben Kingsley plays the professor and "cultural critic," David Kepesh, the latest of Roth's recurrent alter egos--he was the protagonist of two of Roth's other recent novels.

Words like "joyless" and "hushed" are used about this movie. Indeed it isn't fun. As if to emphasize that, there's Penelope Cruz--who has such a wild good time acting crazy and fighting with Javier Bardem in Woody Allen's current overseas venture, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She's sweet and luscious this time, which leaves her talents underused by a mile. It's hard not to feel that she is being humiliated, as Consuela is. In both films, she gets to make out in a photographic darkroom. In Vicky Cristina, she's in charge there; this time, she's just a silly idiot being charmed by a mononmaniac. As for Kingsley, there is more of him here than in the currently showing The Wackness and Transsiberian, and less. His Kepesh is a minor media darling. He has a book review show and does TV appearances. He's recently been interviewed by Charlie Rose about a new book. The scene with the real Charlie falls flat. It has no spark. Coixet has not found a tone. Kepesh also teaches his class in literary criticism, which begins with incredibly banal remarks about reading, before a large classroom with stadium seating; Consuela is in front, of course.

The casting of supporting roles is interesting but not happy. Patricia Clarkson plays Carolyn, Kepesh's lover for twenty years. Suave, shapely, and trim for her age, Clarkson too often gets to play a buttoned down sophisticate who ultimately is just a nice hairdo with fading skin. But she deserves better. As Kepesh's best friend George, we find that Dennis Hopper has lost his old intensity; all that's left is the ability to laugh a little too hard. Debbie Harry as George's wife is admirable, but gets only a few minutes.

There is no chemistry between Kingsley and Cruz. This is partly because Kingsley is trying throughout the picture to imitate a large hook-nosed piece of granite. Cruz has lovely breasts, hair, mouth, skin. This time she gets to show them all. It's voyeuristic, but they do all look great, and Kepesh's fixation upon them, which Consuela is absurdly happy to accept as of true value, is essential to the plot. Of course Cruz isn't 24; she's 34, and that isn't good.

Peter Sarsgaard, as Kenny, Kepesh's 35-year-old or "nearly forty" doctor son (the script wavers) who hates his father for leaving his mother, is shrill and pouting. He seems gay, but probably isn't meant to be in this macho heterosexual tale, since he is happily married but then falls heir to the Philip Roth plot rules by having an affair, despite himself.

The Kepesh of Elegy has a perfect apartment, plays very creditable Bach on his excellent piano, and when away from there performs successfully in his various roles as public intellectual, but his existence is a shambles. He's a hollow man. The big thing that's missing from this movie other than more convincing evidence of Kepesh's intellectual accomplishments, is more sex--of the most down and dirty kind--which the discreet Ms. Coixet perhaps could not handle. The story as Roth conceives it--but not in the film--is finally about Kepesh's quest for some epiphanic bridge between sex and romance. Though we see Kepesh and Consuela and Carolyn in bed, there's not a lot of activity, whereas Roth's novel is graphic and brutal and his Kepesh sought to prove that sex was the thing that gave life meaning. In the Coixet-Nicholas Meyer adaptation, that essential element is lacking. This is just an obsessive affair--without anything to justify it but Cruz's beautiful boobs. The ending is fuzzy and fudged, a couple on the beach--signifying nothing.

The looks of the movie don't help anything. Jean-Claude Larrieu's cinematography is excessively dark and distractingly pretty. At certain arbitrary moments, he uses a hand-held camera and deliberately jiggles it around, like an amateur scribbling on a painting to make it look old. This is a posh, glossy, terrible movie. Though Thomas Benton's The Human Stain left a lot out of the novel and Anthony Hopkins was wrong in the lead role, that Roth adaptation was a masterpiece compared to this. A good contrast is another recent film about a Jewish intellectual involved in a May-December romance, Starting Out in the Evening. Frank Langella is a bit stiff in that, but still much more complex and believable.


________________

My review of Coixet's The Secret Life of Words appeared here in December 2006.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.