Susan Granger’s review of “Elegy” (Samuel Goldwyn Films)
How ironic that it took a woman, Spanish director Isabel Coixet, to capture the inherently male agony about facing mortality that the ultimately misogynistic intellectual Philip Roth infused in his 2001 novella “The Dying Animal.”
University professor and celebrated NPR talk-show host David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is totally self-absorbed and cynical to his core. He considers his one-and-only marriage a ‘mistake’ and is estranged from his understandably embittered grown son, Kenneth (Peter Sarsgaard), now a physician. His only confidante is a philandering Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, George O’Hearn (Dennis Hopper). While David enjoys seducing attractive female students – wisely refraining until after grades come out – he maintains a casual, emotionally uninvolved sexual relationship with Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), a successful traveling businesswoman.
That all changes when he meets Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz), an impressionable graduate student who is dazzled by his worldly knowledge and considerable charm. For David, his passionate obsession with Consuela – and her enticing physical beauty – is the closest he’s ever come to the elusive emotion called love, but she is 30 years younger than he. When they’re not together, his fertile imagination runs rampant and he’s filled with jealousy. Realizing this, he wonders: what kind of future could they have together?
“Stop worrying about growing old,” his friend advises. “And think about growing up.”
Adapted by Nicholas Meyer and directed by Coixet, the sophisticated story of the fragile liaison between David and Consuela unfolds at a richly textured, leisurely pace – with unexpected twists and turns as the optimism of youth confronts the wisdom of age. Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz are magnificent, as are Dennis Hopper and Patricia Clarkson. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Elegy” is an insightful 9, an evocative meditation on lust and death.
