I know it's not de rigeur to reveal the critic's personal perspective, but there are no rules for these things. So there.
I've been in my time - sadly no longer, sigh - a beautiful young woman passionately in love with a man old enough to be my dad. I chose the relationship which lasted for about seven years, and it was one of the most profound of my life. So when I'm confronted, as so often, with similar onscreen accounts I long to find some semblance of truth in the story.
In yet another tale of a less than likely man sharing love with a gorgeous woman young enough to be his daughter, Philip Roth's source for this well-acted screen version proves his focus is skewed. We can only assume that's to justify something that keeps him awake at night and filled with rage. For as the shrinks say, depression is repressed rage.
I know I'm not the only person who feels this way about Roth and Co. because others more illustrious than I have gone into print with their convictions about why some men are compelled to write about people with such disdain.
Roth first inflicted David Kepesh on us in 1972 with The Breast, in which he explored the unresolved emotional transitions from a boy's dependence on his mother to his obsessions with a succession of unattainable women, rejecting, of course, those who are all too attainable. It's an eternally absorbing theme for western, especially American, men. I've never come across an instance of it in reading about tribes studied by Marshall Sahlins or Colin Turnbull.
He brought Kepesh back two more times and it's the latest of these, The Dying Animal, upon which the film is based.
The trouble is that if the focus is, as Roth's, almost entirely on the man, we get a diatribe that feels quite petulent in a post-modern era. It's the selfish solopsism that cannot reach beyond babyhood to understand and celebrate a true interaction between heterosexual partners.
Roth's entrapment in his one-sided pov renders half the population there merely for the enjoyment and/or abuse of the other. Kepesh catalogs his student-turned-lover Consuela, objectifying her as he would one of the paintings he uses as a professor of modern culture.
Their eventual affair takes up most of Isabel Coixet's deftly directed film, adapted by Nicholas Meyer's competent but unsurprising screenplay.
Considering some of the liberties taken to translate the book, including all the flashbacks that link the character to his previous literary outings, perhaps Coixet and Meyer might have been braver in re-focusing the story for a wider film audience. Perhaps they might have overcome the emotional claustrophobia of Roth's book to achieve a real truth about human relationships.
Penelope Cruz is so good, she not only matches the screen presence of Ben Kingsley's Kapesh but wipes him off the screen, especially in the final scene of her revelation.
What would have made the scene more than an isolated element would have been a sharing of screen time to allow us to know more of this love, or of Carolyn, his lover of twenty-years [Patricia Clarkson whose every moment is perfectly judged], or of his friend and sometime Agony Uncle George - a nicely subdued and warm Dennis Hopper.
But no, every single character appears only in relation to Kapesh. And, good as Kingsley is, there is nothing really that compelling about Kapesh to absorb us in the way he does Roth. It's a shame, really, because that final scene of Cruz's should have come at the end of her story. If Roth and the filmmakers were honest, they'd recognize this is actually her story.
And just a tiny word about a surprising cameo as George's wife whom we meet in the hospital where her husband is hanging on by a thread - it's an almost unrecognizable Debbie Harry. She's terrific!
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Demisemicenturian
Posted - 12/23/2008 : 14:36:05 I didn't mind the film being focused on the male character's perspective, as I think it is up front about being so, but I'm still undecided overall. I don't think that a film necessarily needs to have 'substance' but this one somehow feels as though it is lacking in that department.
And Penelope Cruz is kinda funny-looking in this (in a general way).
- a beautiful young woman passionately in love with a man old enough to be my dad. I chose the relationship which lasted for about seven years, and it was one of the most profound of my life. So when I'm confronted, as so often, with similar onscreen accounts I long to find some semblance of truth in the story.