"Elegy": Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz stand out as lovers

MOVIE REVIEW

Philip Roth's 2001 novella, "The Dying Animal," is the basis for "Elegy," a small but sturdy vehicle for Sir Ben Kingsley, who turns it into a tour de force.

Kingsley plays David Kepesh, an aging literature professor and cultural critic who becomes a minor celebrity thanks to his appearances on public television. His duties include covering theatrical events for which he has little sympathy or enthusiasm.

He sleeps with a longtime mistress (Patricia Clarkson), as well as a beautiful, and much younger, student (Penélope Cruz) — the latest in a long line of students willing to bed him. Although he mostly manages to keep them safely compartmentalized from each other, Cruz's character turns out to be more than he can handle.

She takes him seriously, and he develops a terrible jealousy that's partly the result of his awareness that he's in his 60s. She's several decades younger, and he could always lose her to a man her own age. Rarely has he felt so vulnerable.

Dennis Hopper plays his philandering best friend, a cheerful academic who advises him on the handling of student mistresses. Peter Sarsgaard is David's embittered son, who hypocritically disapproves of his father's affairs.

The screenwriter, Nicholas Meyer, who adapted Roth's "The Human Stain" less successfully several years ago, has stayed remarkably close to the source. The only major change is a lowering of the scale of Kenny's disdain for his father, which is rather freakishly overbearing in the book.

Meyer has also reduced the sexual frankness of the novel, which sometimes approaches the obsessiveness of Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint." It's up to the film's sensitive Spanish director, Isabel Coixet, to suggest what Roth spells out. She does an admirably concise job.

Coixet has directed several feature films ("My Life Without Me," "The Secret Life of Words"), but she's probably best-known for "Bastille," one of the sharper short stories in last year's "Paris je t'aime," which gave Miranda Richardson quite a workout as a woman who wins back her straying husband in the worst way.

Filmed last year in Vancouver, B.C., "Elegy" also puts Coixet's actors front and center. Cruz, who got behind the project when others had given up, gives one of her most heartfelt performances. Hopper does a lovely job with the kind of exit scene that is bound to be excerpted if/when he ever gets a Lifetime Achievement Award.

As for Kingsley, he is, at 64, exactly the right age to play a man whose aging body forces him to become more reflective. In Roth's words, this is "the first time of life that you stand entirely outside of while you're in it ... And the ferocity of the objectivity is brutal."

When he visited the Seattle International Film Festival in May, Kingsley praised "stillness" as an acting technique; he said he tries to do less and less as an actor because, "I think the camera is allergic to acting." Although it can be confrontational and dramatic, "Elegy" ultimately requires exactly that kind of restraint.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com