Elegy: 113 minutes. Rated: M. Director: Isabel Coixet.
Starring: Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, Deborah Harry
Readers tend to love or loathe Philip Roth, and I am firmly in the former camp. But even I was not enamoured with his 2001 novella, The Dying Animal.
It is the third of Roth's books featuring David Kepesh as narrator: a New York literature professor and highbrow celebrity who is self-indulgent, narcissistic, and driven by the urge to sexually conquer (I choose the verb deliberately) as many women as possible. To help you get the picture, in his first fictional incarnation Kepesh metamorphosised into a giant breast.
There are those critics who think these qualities are universal to Roth's men. Not so. His favourite alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, is preoccupied by sex, yes, but by much else also, notably a raging grief for his own lost family and childhood. Kepesh in contrast has shucked off everything but his own desire.
For this reason I was a little cautious about seeing the new film, Elegy, based on The Dying Animal. Particularly given how disfigured one of Roth's great novels, The Human Stain, was in its translation to screen. However this is one of those rare instances where the film is more successful than the book.
The Dying Animal relates the story of the ageing Kepesh's sexual obsession with a young Cuban student, Consuela Castillo. Well, not so much with Consuela as with her 'magnificent breasts'. The book is told in first-person, so all that we see and hear is mediated by Kepesh. And given Kepesh's self-obsession, we get a very clear portrait of him while everyone else, particularly Consuela, remains a cipher.
The nature of film makes such telescoping impossible. All the characters are three-dimensional, and Consuela is up there on screen in her own right, not merely as the fantasy of Kepesh. Given she is played by an actor as gorgeous and dignified as Penelope Cruz is in this film makes that distinctive reality all the more convincing.
Film also demands a different emotional register. The abrasive cynicism which characterises Roth's novel would not have transferred well into the emotional intensity of cinema, and Elegy's director, Isabel Coixet (and it can't have hurt that she is a woman), wisely chose to make her story redemptive rather than ironic.
In The Dying Animal the damage done is to Kepesh's