Elegy

(2008)

Directed by

Isabel Coixet

Review by Zach Saltz

While Isabel Coixet’s Elegy lacks the hard-edged manner of the Phillip Roth novel on which it is based (The Dying Animal), it nonetheless radiates with Roth’s uncanny ability to present cool, brash academic types who cannot quite figure out whether their priorities lie in critiquing the latest avant-garde off-Broadway production for a bourgeoisie periodical from the East End, or screwing the next cute grad student who walks into his classroom.  In the case of Professor David Kepesh (played by Ben Kingsley), the answer to the riddle lies in a combination of the two: He asks the beautiful young Cuban immigrant Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz) to join him at the theater, where, after the play, they proceed to go back to his flat to perform their own show. 

If you ever went to college, particularly one of those WASP-y metropolitan schools back east, you are familiar with these types of people.  World-wary professors, usually the older, divorced variety, who say they throw lavish cocktail parties for their student’s graduation, but in reality, merely feel more comfortable in the act of seducing students at their own safe domicile rather than the PC-laden confines of sexually-acute campuses.  Younger, painfully naïve girls, woefully unaware of their luminous beauty and its effect on all spectators, barely removed from the pillow fights of prep school, eager to be introduced to the world by any soft-spoken, debonair intellectual who tells them they know and understand it.  The mix is usually tragic, as Elegy demonstrates, but while it lasts, it can be something beautiful.

The movie is curious in the way it takes time to slowly develop and unravel its characters.  At first, we assume Kepesh is one of the deviant, tail-chasing, booze-providing English professors we read about in Roth or Saul Bellow novels or see in Woody Allen movies; but Kepesh is in reality a taciturn and solemn figure, avidly cynical of the manufactured institutions of love and marriage, ashamed of the fractured relationship with his son, Kenny (Peter Sarsgaard), as result of his reluctance to decry his “emancipated manhood.��  He has a dark room in his flat where he develops his own melancholic black and white pictures, and even screwing his longtime sex buddy (Patricia Clarkson) is reduced to meditation and order rather than cheap, transient thrills.  When he tells Consuela that her face is a work of art, we believe it. 

Indeed, the movie’s most interesting creation, however, is the Cruz character, the ravishing daughter of conservative Cuban immigrants, who loves Kepesh more than he could ever realize.  She concedes the relationship cannot work – it ends when Kepesh becomes curious and jealous of her former lovers – but in her restlessly naïve girlishness, believes him when he says he’ll take her to Paris.  Who would not want to believe him?  Stricken with the same sort paranoia as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (what psychoanalysts refer to as “Madonna-Whore Complex”), Kepesh becomes overwhelmingly possessive, and unable to identify her compassionate, albeit irrational, love for him.  Consuela is wise in the sort of way that the Mariel Hemingway character was wise in Manhattan, and upon Kepesh accosting her at the Cuban dance hall where she goes with her brother, she tells him, “Don’t ruin it.”  Love is too multifarious a notion to entangle itself with the feelings these two characters have for one another.

Elegy works because, by the end, we tend to care more about its characters than the way the film is constructed (always characteristic of a good motion picture).  There are a few flaws and subplots along the way that don’t really work (believing Dennis Hopper as a respected, Pulitzer Prize winning poet is a little tough to stomach), but the centerpiece of the movie – the relationship between the Kingsley and Cruz characters – is believable, forthright, and brutally authentic.  Kingsley is, of course, excellent (though banging both Mary-Kate Olson and Penelope Cruz in the same summer at his age deserves some sort of medal), and Penelope Cruz is even better here than she was in Volver.  The film lacks the hard edge of Roth’s fervent and ripe Jewish cynicism (though the use of Satie’s Ogives gives the film a cold Parisian intellectuality), and is content to accentuate a point that has become trite in motion pictures, perhaps, but rarely nullified: that as much as we abhor the notion of falling in love, we cannot control our ability to deny it.

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