"Elegy" (2008, movie)

                                                                                                                

Philip Roth's angry, painful novella The Dying Animal, about Roth's recurring and now ageing character David Kepesh and his self-lacerating affair with a beautiful young student, has been intelligently transformed into a movie called Elegy. The change of title is a clue to how the text has been softened and sweetened - elegies are composed in honour of dead people, not dying animals - but the result works perfectly well on its own terms, and it is substantially better than the last Roth adaptation to reach the screen, The Human Stain. As the story of a love affair and its long, unhappy endgame, it looks interestingly like a middle-period Woody Allen with fewer laughs, a wintry, desolate Annie Hall, complete with a silent flashback-montage of the affair's most bittersweet moments at the film's close. But the dramatisation by screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and director Isabel Coixet opens up Roth's self-enclosed male world of rapture and rage; it gives the women a voice of their own, with an excellent performance from Penélope Cruz.

Elegy
Production year: 2008
                                    
Runtime: 112 mins
Directors: Isabel Coixet
Cast: Deborah Harry, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson, Penelope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard, Sir Ben Kingsley


Ben Kingsley plays Kepesh, the 60-something divorcé and academic media star. There is an excellent, low-key scene at the very beginning establishing his celebrity status on a talk show, genially proclaiming America's lost heritage of pleasure, suppressed by the dominant tradition of puritans and Protestants. He has regular, no-strings-attached sex with old flame Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson) and a rewarding, intimate friendship with a poet, George O'Hearn (Dennis Hopper), whose own prestige is, agreeably, not so great as to threaten his. The only flaw in his life is his grown-up son, Kenneth (Peter Sarsgaard), still angry at Kepesh for running out on his mother.

Kepesh teaches a literary theory class and, mindful of sexual harassment rules, always waits until his grades are awarded at the end of every academic year before hosting a party to facilitate a seduction of the ripest young woman available. He has no scruples about exploiting to the full his dual prerogative of famous person and fascinating older man, and is entranced by Consuela Castillo, played by Penélope Cruz, a gorgeous young student from a wealthy immigrant Cuban family, whose innocence and gaucherie are signalled by a nerdish fringe. She is overwhelmed by his charm, which Kingsley characteristically projects as a beady-eyed stillness, although in the book Kapesh is looser and more garrulous. (Once their affair gets underway, incidentally, her hair switches almost instantly to Cruz's more familiar drop-dead-gorgeous styling: the transformation is probably a bit too easy.)

He is electrified by this extraordinary gift, so late in his life; previously, Kepesh had been appalled to discover nature's secret sick joke, namely, that men are agonised by sexual desire well into unattractive old age, and yet Kepesh had always had the fame, status and robust health to gratify his needs. The sick joke is rather now that he is in love for the first time in his life, and sees with terrible clarity how Consuela will want to leave him reasonably soon. He becomes jealous, controlling, tormented and mad - inflamed with a passionate connoisseurship of Consuela's body, and yet idiotically, selfishly unable to commit himself to her in the normal way she actually wants. The imminent, and inevitable, end of the affair prefigures his own death in a way nothing else could: and when it happens, it is a terrible kind of death, more real than the real thing.

"When you make love to a woman, you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life," says Kepesh: the kind of mad, male sentence that offends against romantic correctness, and, arguably, strips him of the right to be treated as that most overrated of things, a "sympathetic" character. Revenge is a unpleasant thing to insinuate into the idea of love-making, however, and I have always wondered if it does not play a part in the denouement that Roth himself contrives for Consuela and for their relationship. (Consuela could, for example, have simply left him for a younger man, become a more famous writer herself and never called him again - which would have been unthinkably painful.)

In the book, Consuela is objectified: an adjunct of Kepesh's consciousness, and present through literary-sexual riffing. On screen, Coixet reclaims her: she takes part in the story on her own terms and has a new autonomy. Cruz is excellent, and we can see what Kepesh cannot - what perhaps his creator cannot - that her maturity and intelligence are easily a match for his. As Carolyn, Patricia Clarkson has a tremendous speech about how lonely her life is, reduced to dating on the internet. She too is very good.

What the film can't reproduce is the continuous, acrid pain of what male desire often is, thwarted or not: a continuous, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute pain, almost like a cancer pain. Opinions may divide, on gender lines, about whether this is an insight into the human condition or an egotistical indulgence, but it gives the book its severity and its ferocious magnesium flare, which the more lenient film version has tamped down. Coixet has brought off a creative and corrective account of Roth nonetheless: an intelligent film for grown-ups.