It‘s a minor detail to be hung up on, but Penelope Cruz’s intended age in Elegy is an aggravation. At 34, Cruz is strikingly beautiful, and she possesses an almost childlike charm. The film, though, casts her as what we can only assume is an undergrad — Ben Kingsley’s professor asks her at one point if she went straight into university from high school. Complaining that the May in another Hollywood May-December romance isn’t young enough may seem unfair, but so much of the film’s weight revolves around Cruz’s characters inexperience and naïveté that the disconnect is genuinely off-putting.
At its heart, Elegy is a film about an aging man’s attitude towards love, sex and relationships. Kingsley plays David Kepesh, an English professor and self-proclaimed hedonist who views marriage as little more than a trap. That’s why he got out of his, leaving his wife and his still resentful son (the always excellent Peter Sarsgaard) in favour of uncommitted encounters. He has a seemingly perfect relationship with a woman who wants nothing more than the occasional shag (Patricia Clarkson) and spends much of his time with poet George O’Hearn (Dennis Hopper), a friend whose unhappy marriage is proof enough of that institution’s failure.
Upon first observing Cruz in one of his lectures, Kingsley is struck. He waits until after all grades have been assigned before propositioning her (he may be a bit of a letch, but he’s well aware of the danger of sexual harassment suits), and soon finds himself in the closest thing to a committed relationship he’s had since his marriage. Naturally, he reacts like a teenager, doing his best to avoid commitment while still making an ass of himself through the occasional bit of jealous behaviour. As the film progresses, Kingsley naturally faces conflicts with both Clarkson and Cruz and takes some stabs at reuniting with his son. Though the elements are somewhat predictable, they’re handled with tenderness and a sense of reality — nothing is forced, and nothing is tidy.
It’s nice to see Kingsley acting again after wasting his talents in dreck like The Love Guru and Uwe Boll’s Bloodreign. Likewise, Dennis Hopper steals all of his scenes thanks to the manic glint in his eye — he’s not the maverick of his Easy Rider days, but he’s still an awfully charismatic presence. Even Cruz turns in a compelling performance, but in a film that is so much about age, her character’s ambiguity is enough to throw everything off.
