Elegy (2008)
Jul 10th, 2009 by John Murphy
Elegy, adapted from Philip Roth’s novella, The Dying Animal, aspires to be a meditation on the two capital-letter subjects, Sex and Death. As such, its insights are hardly revelatory: “It’s not about growing old, it’s about growing up,” observes a supporting character, helpfully supplying the movie’s main theme for any note-takers in the audience.
I should probably admit right off my general distaste for Roth’s work. In addition to The Dying Animal, I’ve only read his three most recent books (Everyman, Exit Ghost, and Indignation) and the the only reasons I finished them were because they are short and I was paid to review them.
For me, then, Elegy is a quiet triumph, since the movie succeeds at making an insufferable character — Roth’s frequent alter-ego, David Kepesh — not only sufferable, but sympathetic. Kingsley plays Kepesh as a moderately well-known New York intellectual– he banters with Charlie Rose about America’s puritanical beginnings in the opening sequence– whose preening pretension and cultural acumen is catnip to his Columbia students. (I’m reminded of the “Deriddettes,” the black-clad crew of young women who would sit front row at Jacques Derrida lectures.) Since this is based on a Roth novella, Kepesh is an unapologetic skirt-chaser, scanning the rows of students on the first day of class for his next prey.
He singles out Consuela Castillo (Penlope Cruz), a Cuban-born graduate student who has “the most beautiful breasts” Kepesh has ever seen. Ergo, he must have her. With words that seem rehearsed, he tells her at his cocktail party (thrown for the express purpose of bedding a student) that she resembles Goya’s Clothed Maja. In the novel it was a Velazquez, but either way she takes the compliment.
Roth’s protagonists are typically Peter Pans frozen in perpetual adolescence, believing that “when you make love to a woman you get revenge for all the things that defeat you in life.” How romantic. What does Consuela see in him? It’s a question the movie never satisfactorily answers, though Kingsley’s performance certainly helps, but that is beside the point. The movie is about his gaze, not hers. What is true of Roth and the film is that Kepesh is good company in many ways; articulate, intense, intelligent, a man of wealth and taste. He plays piano, develops his own b & w photos, lectures on “Practical Criticism,” writes theater reviews for the New Yorker, and chats with fellow academics on his radio program.
Ultimately, however, Kepesh is less passionate about art than about how art can be used to disarm and seduce. A Bach fugue is more about foreplay than about form and beauty expressed musically. He could serve as Exhibit A for the Darwinian argument that we display knowledge as part of an elaborate mating ritual, like the proverbial peacock, rather than as a worthy and desirable end to itself; a means of accessing truth and acquiring wisdom. Kepesh’s cultivation is a carefully constructed and controlled performance. Consuela surprises him by inspiring fresh, unrehearsed emotions. Is it her youth? The poignancy of passing time, but undiminished lust? Her beauty? Her breasts? Whatever it is, the love that she offers in return for his slow-growing vulnerability is not enough. He is trapped by his idee-fixe of sexual liberation, a lie that begets lies.
If for you the thought of a sixty-something professor seducing his twenty-something student is unappetizing, I empathize. Philip Roth has, in my view, rightly been accused of misogyny. I won’t go into a lengthy critical exegesis, but will simply direct you to his novel Everyman, where another of Roth’s aging lotharios fixates over a younger woman because of her willingness to have anal sex. Roth might call it honesty, and maybe we can agree that it’s honestly misognyistic.
So what happens when a woman directs Philip Roth material? As in the case of American Psycho, the controversial (and again arguably misogynistic) Bret Easton Ellis book adapted for the screen by Oxford-educated Mary Harron, Elegy is directed by Isabel Coixet, a young Spanish filmmaker with only two previous movies to her credit. She is already a confident and assured filmmaker with a keen eye and a poetic sense of pacing.
Maybe I’m indulging in mild (and hopefully pardonable) sexism myself when I suggest that Coixet’s presence behind the camera changes the complexion of the film, and perhaps its reception. It raises interesting questions. How would a male director have shot Cruz’s nude scenes? The sex scenes? And if they were shot precisely the same way, would we perceive them differently knowing a male eye was behind the lens?
Coixet directs with a sensitivity that is never quite sentimentality; her woozy camera watches intensely, in claustrophobic close-up, as plot points turn on the turn-of-a-phrase, or the flicker of a smile. She quietly cues us to Kepesh’s transformation from a lonely hedonist to an emotionally involved lover. Whereas Roth’s work can be hard, cold, and misanthropic, Cloizot’s intimacy — the close proximity of the camera to her two leads’ expressive faces — results in a tenderness and pathos I have yet to encounter in Roth.
Much of this can be ascribed to the two committed and convincing lead performances. Ben Kingsley, like his compatriot Michael Caine, is never less than good, often in movies that don’t deserve his talent. He can be demonic (Sexy Beast) or saintly (Ghandi), and here he splits the difference with a performance that delicately calibrates Kepesh’s self-contempt and self-regard. Though he doesn’t soften Kepesh’s hard edges, Kingsley also reveals the insecurity behind his womanizing, showing it to be at least partially a consequence of fear: fear of commitment and the fear of never being loved for who he is (a valid fear, considering who he is).
Kepesh begins by treating Consuela as an object, a thing to be pursued and then possessed. But love is not compatible with use, and eventually she becomes more than a body to him. When he photographs her late in the film he sees her for the first time as a person with a soul, deserving of dignity and respect. Kepesh has finally grown up. Roth leaves this transformation an open-ended question in the novella. In resolving the question, Elegy does not a compromise its source material, but improves on it.
