January 26, 2009

"Elegy"

Here's my review from last August in The American Conservative:

Paradoxically but profitably, Hollywood assumed that America's youth wanted to spend May and June, the two months of the year with the nicest weather, inside watching blockbuster movies. Now that the dog days of summer are here, the big movies are trickling to a halt and art house films for adults are back.

You can't get much art housier than "Elegy," in which Sir Ben Kingsley ("Gandhi") portrays one of novelist Philip Roth's lesser alter egos, the lecherous literature professor David Kepesh.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously asserted, "There are no second acts in American lives." This is often true for alcoholics, such as the many American writers who resorted to the bottle to restore temporarily the visual world's luminous glow, that green light at the end of the dock that shone for them when they were young and in their lyrical primes.

In contrast, a social novelist such as Roth can potentially keep getting better as he becomes older and wiser. Roth hit the bestseller lists in 1969 with Portnoy's Complaint, the definitive denunciation of "Jewish guilt" (which in Roth's book is the opposite of "white guilt" -- it's the nagging sense that you aren't ethnocentric enough). Then, Roth's career bogged down in experimental conceits.

Over the last decade and a half, from about the age of 60 onward, he's returned with a torrent of strong novels, allowing his fans to proclaim him America's Greatest Living Writer. Perhaps, although there's little mystery to Roth's talent. You can imagine that if you were twice as smart and ten times as hard-working, you too could do what Roth does.

Filmmakers haven't had had much success adapting his recent work. His 2000 novel The Human Stain offered an inherently interesting story inspired by the life of literary critic Anatole Broyard, an important advocate of Roth's early work, who had more or less passed from black to white. The ambitious 2003 film's 1940s flashback scenes, with Wentworth Miller of Prison Break as the student ruthlessly shedding his black family, were moving. Unsurprisingly, however, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Hollywood's laziest actor, proved hopeless at seeming part-black.

"Elegy" is adapted from Roth's lesser 2001 book, The Dying Animal. The 62-year-old Professor Kepesh, who moonlights as an arts maven on New York's PBS TV channel, methodically seduces one of his students each semester: "They are helplessly drawn to celebrity, however inconsiderable mine may be." In long digressions, Kepesh, like Roth a child of the 1930s, salutes the 1960s Sexual Revolution when he shed his wife and small son for attachment-free affairs with co-eds. The divorce rate exploded in 1968, in part because the Baby Boom that had started in 1946 meant there was suddenly a huge crop of 18 to 22-year-old women competing for the attention of the small number of successful (and thus generally married) older men.

His life is perfect, Kepesh believes, except for being constantly upbraided about his marital irresponsibility by his resentful son (another striking supporting performance from the protean Peter Sarsgaard, who apparently looks too much like an old-fashioned leading man to get the big roles in today's movies that his talent deserves).

Then, Kepesh has the misfortune to land a bland but beautiful 24-year-old (Penelope Cruz of "Volver"). To his horror, he finds he can't forget her like all the others because she has such perfect breasts. It's refreshing, after all those Angelina Jolie movies, to see a film that admits that in real life a lovely woman doesn't have to be, say, a world-class assassin. She just has to be gorgeous, which the 34-year-old Cruz certainly is. On the other hand, her role is intentionally dull.

A tale of an aged lothario's come-uppance should always be good for a farcical laugh. Yet Roth, who has exhaustively worked every conceivable variation on his not exceptionally interesting life story, chose instead to make Kepesh whiny and maudlin.

Roth, always a high bandwidth writer, is at least interesting in The Dying Animal. "Elegy," though, is slow and self-pitying. The dialogue is sparse and uninspired, and there are no flashbacks to the Swinging Sixties to liven matters up. The filmmakers assume that the unappealing Kepesh's story is the stuff of high tragedy. They don't grasp that Kepesh is the anti-hero of his book. The bad guy famously gets all the good lines in Paradise Lost, but not in "Elegy," leaving Kingsley to mope about ponderously in the rain.

Rated R for sexuality, nudity, and language.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

another striking supporting performance from the protean Peter Sarsgaard, who apparently looks too much like an old-fashioned leading man to get the big roles in today's movies that his talent deserves

Yeah, you'd think the "WASPy Harvard elites" who run Hollywood would give the guy his big break.

Anonymous said...

Steve -- not a very good review.

Donald E. Westlake was the best writer of the last century. He wrote more, and better, novels than Roth.

They were, gasp, actually entertaining. Both as Richard Stark (the films Point Blank and Payback with Mel Gibson were based on his first "Parker" novel) detailing the amoral but rigidly honorable adventures of a small time but ruthless crook "Parker," and the comic misadventures of "Dortmunder," the clever criminal whose plans are always undone by random but seemingly unstoppable coincidences.

Moreover, divorces did not "explode" because lots of 22 year old women pursued Philip Roth. They exploded because WOMEN (who initiate 75% of divorces) could and did dump their boring husbands for sex with other men which is indeed what happened.

Your problem Steve, in discussing the male-female dynamic is that you are too old. You are on the other side of the generational divide and being married, have no clue as to the gradual but MASSIVE shift in women's sexual/romantic preferences.

That female Lawyer who loves Obama because it validates her desire to be an unmarried mother and figures it will fix her son right up is pretty much standard fare for most female decision making today, and reflects that shift in 1968.

This shift was driven by the pill and condoms being cheap and reliable, and the Supreme Court decision in 1965 allowing married couples unrestricted access to it, followed by another in 1972 allowing ALL unrestricted access to contraception.

A personal example: waiting in line at the Pharmacy, a Hispanic woman with her teenage daughter were in front, The daughter requesting the morning after pill, with a grin, and no shame. Not very discreet either, no one could help overhearing it (even they would have rather not). The Jerry Springer generation.

Roth's novels are irrelevant, since the belong to the long-dead world of 1955, and academic superstars at that. Not the gritty urban criminal underclass of say 1952-1976 that Westlake always wrote about. Regardless of the year. Westlake is entertaining, Roth boring.

But no one so far has covered the huge shift -- women wanting to orient towards short time not future time, selecting as many Alpha, socially dominant men as possible, creating a "soft" polygamy. THAT drove divorce rates up, and current marriage rates down, along with the rise to majority single motherhood in the UK and 41% in the US.

Anonymous said...

This is, I think the first film Steve has reviewed that has had Debbie Harry in it. Seeing as she's done more films than MM and Madonna put together (and you could throw in Nancy Sinatra and Britney Spears too for good measure) that has to count for something.

Anonymous said...

testing - you've expressed this theory repeatedly in these comments. At length. Probably at least a dozen times. Perhaps Steve simply doesn't agree with you. It happens.

Anonymous said...

"testing99 said...

Steve -- not a very good review.

Donald E. Westlake was the best writer of the last century. He wrote more, and better, novels than Roth."

Hear that? Conrad, Pasternak, Fitzgerald, Solzhenitsyn, Graves, Orwell, Tolkien, Camus?

Hacks, all. The greatest writer of the 20th century was Donald Westlake. I don't doubt that he was a good writer - a lot of crime fiction is pretty good. But, "the best"?

You might spend some of your copious free time reading a little more widely, testing99 - you might develop some taste.

And did it ever occur to you that women don't like you because of your personality, rather than because of their contraception-dictated mating strategies?

(and for what it's worth, my vote for most entertaining writer of the last 50 years would be for George MacDonald Fraser).

Anonymous said...

I agree completely with testing 98 - Roth's work is hugely overrated. Then again, major modernist writers are overrated by defintion - with the sole exception being Marcel Proust.

You find the same bad habits and foul tendencies in the works of Roth as you do in all the nominally great modernist novel-writers of the 20th century, like Joyce, Nabokov and Faulkner. The writing is meretricious and dull, and almost completely bereft of any profound, or even substantive, insights.

Anonymous said...

Testing99 is an interesting guy.
But the way he expounds his theories again and again with absolute certainty...
He's like a younger, pop-culture version of that Spengler guy from Asia Times Online.

Anonymous said...

"Paradoxically but profitably, Hollywood assumed that America's youth wanted to spend May and June, the two months of the year with the nicest weather, inside watching blockbuster movies."

I don't know that this is so paradoxical. Movie-going generally involves going out at night and coming home late; this is more appealing to do in the summer than in the winter. As a writer living in LA, Steve Sailer may have a little trouble distinguishing summer and winter—try to think back to those Chicago days. During three years that I lived in Los Angeles, the muting of seasonal cues became stranger to my perception the longer I was there. I would strain to recollect milestones by which I could reckon the current month, much as I usually do to figure out the date of the month when a calendar is not at hand. A neighbor cut down a Norfolk pine, and I obtained a couple feet of the trunk to show the cub scouts its rings. It turned out that the trunk didn’t have any distinct rings. Not even the trees of LA know what season it is.

Anonymous said...

ya,
maybe t99 is an intelligent robot. Some robotics department at uni is using him to come up with versions of a certain pool of words.

Anonymous said...

testing99,
my advice: get off the porn. it creates a false illusion of what women "should" look like. very few actually look like that. the ones that do are probably no good. the one exception is already married. nuff said.

albertosaurus said...

Your problem Steve, in discussing the male-female dynamic is that you are too old.

Funny, I would have said because you are too young.

Anonymous said...

For everyone's convenience, I present The Shorter Testing99:

"Women refuse to sleep with me because they're all a bunch of dumb nasty sluts who can't appreciate a sensitive genius like me. Oh well, at least I have my extensive porno collection and the comments section of Steve's blog."

Anonymous said...

Testing 99 wrote:

Moreover, divorces did not "explode" because lots of 22 year old women pursued Philip Roth. They exploded because WOMEN (who initiate 75% of divorces) could and did dump their boring husbands for sex with other men which is indeed what happened.

Actually, divorces exploded because of the passage of no-fault divorce laws. NF laws allow either partner to walk away from the marriage with part of the assets even if they are engaged in adultery. Prior to this if a woman cheated she was thrown out on her ass with nothing. I don't know what happened if the man cheated.

The government went nuts between 1960-1975 and legalized the pill, abortion, and reckless divorce. Maybe having a democratic candidate chanting "change" elected in 1960 and another one elected in a landslide in 1964 with a large democratic majority in Congress had something to do with it.

Anonymous said...

I don't know what happened if the man cheated.

Alimony, instead of a 50/50 split plus child support -- Alimony meant more.

I've been waiting for an iSteve column on the fruits of California's no fault, 50/50 property split divorce laws.


.....

T99, all you have to do is make yourself over into an Alpha Man, and then you'll get plenty girls! It's EZ!