"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