Word: kepesh
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This is not a matter David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) particularly likes to dwell on. And why should he? He's a fit man in his sixties, a Columbia professor and a minor "public intellectual" (hateful phrase, that one) in New York. (Indeed, the film opens with him in conversation with Charlie Rose, who does an excellent imitation of himself.) Dave has a convenient, purely sexual relationship with Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), who gives a lovely, knowing performance as a woman of a certain age. He has a good friendship with a poet named George (a wise and excellent Dennis Hopper). Polymathically...
...mourns perhaps excessively. She, astonishingly, returns to him some years later. And here both the Roth novel and Isabel Coixet's film (written by Nicholas Meyer) take a truly memorable turn. For she is gravely ill and living alone with the possibility of premature death. She wants Kepesh to take erotic photographs of her before the surgeon's knife destroys her beauty. Does she want more from him? If so, can he respond to her need...
...true of The Dying Animal, when mortality settles on the wrong person at the wrong time. There are things wrong with Coixet's movie. Ben Kingsley is, of course, a fine actor, but in this instance there seems to me something smug, held back, in his work. Roth's Kepesh, at least for a time, has more spritzing fun with his minor celebrity life than Kingsley's does. The latter seems insufficiently surprised and confused by the turn his life takes. And Coixet has a tendency to linger on some of her scenes, giving them an unnecessary, darkly portentous quality...
...that said, this is a good, serious and absorbing movie - especially, perhaps, for a reviewer who is roughly Kepesh's age and, of course, eagerly evading the issues his story forces up. Death in the movies usually presents itself as the end of a bullet's path. Or, alternatively, in an inspiring deathbed scene, where the victim appears to be suffering no more than a bad case of la grippe. It's important to see the threat of death as predictably unpredictable, another fine mess we heedlessly fall into. And that Elegy does very powerfully...
...Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise. When Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh (The Professor of Desire) and Zuckerman writhed between desire and conscience, the psychoanalytic model was turned into serious comic fiction...