Honolulu Weekly

Why are all the little shorties humping Ben Kingsley this year? In The Wackness, Mary-Kate Olsen got busy with him in a phone booth and now, in Elegy, Penelope Cruz bumps uglies with the Oscar winner who, as time goes by, is beginning to look more and more like Golem.

Regardless of the reasoning behind his sudden wealth of sumthin’ sumthin’, Kingsley stars as David Kepesh, a professor of practical criticism in New York City and supporter of the concept of debauched Bacchanalia, rebelling against our country of straight-laced Puritanism. What else would you expect from an academic who wrote a book entitled The Origins of American Hedonism?

Cruz plays Consuela Castillo, a much-younger student who becomes his lover. The professor becomes instantly obsessed with losing his new object of desire, constantly fretting with “his terrible jealousy,” even as he continues sleeping with another former student, a much older one played by a blunt, yet wearily knowing Patricia Clarkson. Dennis Hopper plays his lecherous best friend, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who urges the falling David to keep things on a FTF level.

As the title would suggest, the proceedings are mournful, but there is no real sense of passion or even chemistry between Kingsley and Cruz. Not once do we believe we are watching real people engage in a subtle, bedroom game of sexual and mental domination. At 34 years old, Cruz tries to make herself look younger by combing her bangs down to her eyebrows, and while she spends much of the film topless, thus qualifying it as a naked performance, it’s not a convincingly vulnerable one. Kingsley spends the entire film in what seems a wide-eyed daze. He may be trying to tune in to the somber voice-over narration his character gives the proceedings, but it just looks like he’s thinking to himself, “At this point in my career, how is it that I am getting so much ass?”

Based on the Philip Roth novella The Dying Animal, the film even lacks the source material’s cacophonic sense of analytical neurosis; Elegy wants romance to triumph over its inherent sense of subversiveness. Besides the dependable Clarkson, the actors that make the most impact have the smallest roles. Shattered Glass’s Peter Sarsgaard, looking like a doughy Kiefer Sutherland, plays David’s son with a tired, helpless sense of resentment at his morally objectionable father. Ex-Blondie singer Deborah Harry has a cameo as Dennis Hopper’s wife; her weary eyes show the costs of supporting a husband she knows is cheating on her.

Unlike those two performances, the flawed Elegy isn’t thoughtful, passionate, or, ultimately, truthful in its tragedy of old age and its accompanying desires. It’s a film about selfish people pushed to their sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological extremities that just isn’t funereal enough.