Elegy (2008)

No matter how sophisticated or highbrow, it would seem that every arthouse-destined film depicting the life of those who populate academia that does not belong to the today risible lineage of To Sir, With Love to Dead Poets Society, and from Dangerous Minds to Freedom Writers and The Great Debaters depicts the life of the teacher in higher education and even the often tumultuous years of high school as a kind of glum, dismally joyless occupation. Perhaps it speaks to greater honesty in cinema this decade, or just the larger, trendy bitterness and cynicism that prevails in the “indie” world. Just in the '00s, films working partly as counterpoints to the happy, didactically predictable “classroom inspirational” tales that seem to come out every Christmas or January—extending to sports with Coach Carter (which was actually successful on its own terms with one of Samuel L. Jackson's better turns since the late '90s) to Glory Road to Gridiron Gang—films such as 25th Hour, or just this year's Smart People and The Visitor use the despairing “indie” reality of hopelessness and inadequacy the arts routinely finds in academia as “launching pads” for the bulk of their narratives. (The Visitor's sights are set on “inspiration” as well; Richard Jenkins' character's initial quotidian, disheveled appearance and spiritual vacuum are all present at the beginning to be drastically changed. It's a simple, rote drama but it shares with the more abrasive pictures such as 25th Hour the inversion of the teacher-as-mentor dichotomy as the conditions from which the narrative stems.)

Isabel Coixet's Elegy, based on a Philip Roth novel called The Dying Animal, is a pensively cheerless film with a selfish college professor named David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) at its center. It begins with measured, graceful subtleness and concludes like a standard 1930s Hollywood melodrama. Kepesh is a cowardly, irresponsible fellow, but he remains understandable because he's not a hypocrite. He enjoys a lifestyle that includes a twenty-year relationship with a former student named Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson) based on, in her words, “pure fucking”—no sticky issues of the heart, no hurdles involving the entanglements of love, just... well, “pure fucking.” Kepesh intelligently pursues whichever female avatar that attracts his interest by hosting a cocktail party at the end of the semester, which as he says in voice-over is, “always a success.” At one such cocktail party, he speaks without the obligatory shield and formality of instructor to a most beautiful graduate student, Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz), who, at age eleven, immigrated with her parents from her native Cuba to the United States. Naturally, Kepesh's primary engrossment with the gorgeous Consuela is initially limited to the overpowering pulchritude the young lady so unabashedly possesses. Yet as he speaks to her about the arts, about life, and her, he comes to discover that she has a remarkable intellectual reservoir of insights and wisdom beyond her years. Most irresistibly, she has a sensibility and personality belonging to the “Old World,” as Kepesh tells his Pulitzer Prize-winning poet friend George O'Hearn (Dennis Hopper) while playing indoor racket ball. “She is a woman who has to be wooed,” Kepesh excitedly relates, noting one of the great differences between her and every woman he has previously encountered. Kingsley's performance is quite solid all the way around, but works most thoroughly when his cynicism is wedded to the buoyancy that rocks his character in the form of Consuela.

Representing something far more enriching than just a routine conquest for Kepesh, Cruz's ethereally otherworldly beauty is simply the spark that set off Kepesh's infatuation. What Consuela infuses in Kepesh is what Cruz infuses in the film: a liveliness, an unpredictability, adding to the proceedings a sensorial gauze placed over the aforementioned dourness that appropriately seduces the viewer while seducing Kingsley's Kepesh. What Cruz proves here is that she could very well be the new Sophia Loren, an enchantress whose statuesquely ravishing physical attributes and endowments are merely the most visually alluring complement to the arresting deportment and presence of the lady. Her impact here is almost ineffably crucial, and though a substantial amount of that impact is derived from the provisory of the character—Consuela's entry in Kepesh's life is singularly important—much of the harmonic lightness of the film is intangibly wrought with startling incorporiety simply from her being.

Unfortunately, Elegy is committed not to fully exploring what is a deeply fascinating character study-cum-ephemeral love story, but to completing story arcs that only drag the picture down—and drag it out too long. The film is less than two hours long but by the time it ends, the audience has been beaten with recurring motifs and supporting characters whose roles are either too small or too large for the sake of the picture's much more satisfying forefront with Kingsley and Cruz. When Kepesh pusillanimously defies the hopes and dreams of Consuela, Cruz's character is intermittently washed out of the picture, leaving us with only Kepesh, his friend George, George's wife Amy (Deborah Harry) and Kepesh's bitter son Kenneth (Peter Sarsgaard), who has never forgiven his father for walking out on his family. Uninteresting subplots play out in the center stage and one-dimensional characters such as George and Kenneth are given greater superficial import, without leaving much in the way of lasting impressions. The only side character who leaves a mark is Carolyn, performed with delicacy and beguiling charm by Clarkson, whose balanced reaction of hurt and understanding to Kepesh's betrayal of her with Consuela leaves an emotional and thematic mark on Kepesh and the picture. The last act of the picture drags on and on, making the film feel as though it is approximately twenty-five or thirty minutes too long.

Elegy is bittersweetly didactic in its own way. George serves primarily as a spout of mostly well-meaning and sensitive remarks—a few of which are achingly accurate (his pointing to beautiful women being “invisible” rings quite true)—and Kepesh is portrayed by Coixet and Kingsley as a man who learns a nearly invaluable lesson from his dalliances culminating in finding the love of his life, Consuela. As such, the film is very much a mixed bag. Kepesh confronts the realities that haunt, that penetrate deeply, irrevocably. In the final scene between he and Carolyn, he wonders aloud whether or not they have grown up—scooping that meme from his friend George, who instructed him to worry about “growing up,” not growing old—and, the meaning to the realization that he and Carolyn have never truly talked with one another in an over twenty-year relationship of “pure fucking.” Carolyn, ever the realist, notes that it's not such a bad record. She says she knows people married for a longer period of time who have yet to speak with one another with any frankness or openness... or at all. The epiphany that inspires Kepesh, that his experience with Consuela, begun as a base desire to “fuck her,” as he noted in voice-over during the very first phase of the courtship resulted in an actual flowering of mutual respect and love.

The truest point to the film is that every relationship, especially one of any considerable duration and success, finds its equilibrium in the give-and-take not just incumbent on two people attempting to mold their lives around one another but the very complementary exchange most paradoxically present in the love of people of vastly different ages and backgrounds. As an older, literate man, a culture critic and college professor, he gifts Consuela with intellectual passion and sexual superiority (Consuela notes that his admiration and appreciation of her body surpasses those of men closer to her in age). She indelibly injects youthfulness and contradictory responsibility juxtaposed with his older, cynically careless egghead perspective. Unfortunately, the relationship becomes too great for the sake of Kepesh, who, in a moment of uncharacteristic honesty, tells the woman for whom he jealously pines, “A future with you scares me.”