I don’t mind adaptations varying from their source materials, but
when there’s no identifiable rationale for certain pointed alterations,
you end up assigning all sorts of motivations to the adapter. For
instance: Was screenwriter Nicholas Meyer (The Human Stain) so
freaked out by the notion of an older man licking the menstrual blood
off his former student’s inner thigh that he purposely chose to confine
himself to the single coy anecdote she recounts about a high-school
boyfriend asking to watch her bleed? If so, fine—I would be
pretty wide-eyed if such an act made it to the big screen, too. But in
The Dying Animal, a minor Philip Roth novella, that unnerving
scene had a purpose: It illustrated how far the narrator would go for
the sole purpose of owning the total history of his conquest. In the
movie, the older man doesn’t imitate the high-school act, he just gets
jealous. Crazy jealous. It makes you dislike him, but that’s as far as
it goes.
Elegy is about an aging professor and critic, David Kepesh
(Ben Kingsley), who seduces Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz), a
slightly fussy ex-student of Cuban extraction. He adores her breasts
and tries his best to ignore her naive approach to culture. Then he
becomes obsessed. (Dennis Hopper, in the role of a poet friend, plays
confessor for the purpose of exposition.) In contrast to the book,
which is told in the first person and explicitly concerns the impact of
the sexual revolution on an essentially conservative man born in 1930,
the film does very little to get inside the head of its protagonist.
We’re left to wonder, uncomfortably, whether Consuela is indeed as
one-dimensional as she seems, or if the professor is pressing her flat
with the iron of his enormous ego. There’s no point dwelling on the
problem. Between the ugly digital photography, the repellent
characters, and the free-floating misogyny, Elegy is an
unpleasant film.
