Love and Loss

Isabel Coixet’s Elegy is one of the most aptly named motion pictures of recent memory. It is steeped in a feeling of mourning and loss.

Elegy is about an unconventional love, one freighted with inequalities of age and sensibility, as well as the pride and suspicion that people so often bring to intimate relationships.

Coixet’s film is a reworking of Philip Roth’s short novel, The Dying Animal, and centers on David Kepesh, a character Roth has used more than once. Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is a 60ish Columbia University English professor and critic, moderately prominent, but, as he observes in the novel, not a real cultural celebrity. His modest eminence has been sufficient to impress the more susceptible, literary-minded students, especially the females.

It’s a little misleading, therefore, for Coixet to open Elegy with a TV interview of Kepesh by Charlie Rose. (Rose plays himself very ably, but it’s a role he’s been playing for a long time.) This scene and a brief one near the film’s end in which Kepesh conducts a radio book discussion may be mild spoofs, but I couldn’t tell if their banalities are intentional.

Kepesh is an obsessive connoisseur, and exploiter, of young college women, although, as he tells us in a voiceover, it’s been years since he started limiting his sexual adventures to his former students, since that is, the university starting posting sexual harassment phone-line numbers. (This admission is more telling in the book than in the movie.)

He’s been getting around this hardly self-imposed limitation by throwing a party for students at his Manhattan apartment after the last class each year, during which he has often zeroed in on some girl. The girls have responded positively often enough to make these efforts worthwhile, even if they acquiesce primarily from self-aggrandizing motives, or curiosity about being with a much older man.

As the film begins, Kepesh is telling us of Consuela, a beautiful, slightly older student and Cuban émigré (Penelope Cruz). She is dignified and reserved, but approachable. This time, however, his letching leads to something distinctly unusual and unsettling: love. This unlikely affair transforms both of their lives, his most deeply, perhaps, although it’s principally his story and perspective that Elegy tracks. And it is Kepesh’s inability to really believe in their mutual future, to surmount his discomfort over their age difference and his customary cynicism, that produces the film’s elegiac pathos.

This tone is the most significant departure from Roth’s work. His approach didn’t avoid sadness, but his Kepesh wasn’t just rueful, he was angry and tormented. Nicholas Meyer’s script repeats the line that the professor gives us early in the novel: “When you make love to a woman you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life.” This makes more sense in the book than in the film.

Coixet has tamed much of the unruly, angry passion and conflicted doubt in Roth’s conception (including his customary excesses). She’s softened them. On these terms, the results aren’t bad, and Coixet achieves a sometimes touchingly evocative mood. Her direction is measured and muted. She employs carefully dramatic scene compositions and camera movements. The photography is lit for mood enhancement.

From Kingsley, she got a subtly effective performance. The actor lends Kepesh a dignity in his foolishness; his striking, coldly sensuous, aging visage conveys doubt and sorrow.

Cruz’s performance is less successful. She seems a little unsure and miscast. Her pronounced accent is odd in a 30ish woman who came to the States when she was 11. Peter Sarsgaard appears as Kepesh’s alienated, accusatory son from a failed marriage, but the filmmakers have domesticated and softened this relationship too.

Elegy has its virtues but they don’t encompass much of the original’s sense of life’s jarring incompleteness, loss, and conflicted impulses. The film doesn’t fight the dying of the light, it tries to gentle it.