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The Sexy Beast Prowls Again | Ben Kingsley lets Penélope Cruz slip through his fingers in Elegy.

ELEGY
Directed by Isabel Coixet. Starring Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Sarsgaard. Opens Fri, Oct 3.
****1/2

In Elegy, Ben Kingsley pulls off an acting trick that I bet is a lot harder than it looks: he convinces you not just that he’s really smart but also that he’d be really, really good in bed. That’s an important quality to have when you’re the lead character in a Philip Roth story — Elegy is adapted from Roth’s 2001 novella The Dying Animal. Kingsley plays literature professor, esteemed critic, and radio talk show host David Kepesh, a man whose sexual appetites remain undimmed even with his 70th birthday looming too distantly on the horizon. Compact, confident, muscular, Kingsley looks at potent as it’s possible to look at his age — and his shaved head only makes him look all the more phallic.

We’re told that Kepesh has a long history of dalliances with pretty female students, but his latest conquest, a Goyaesque Cuban beauty named Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz), connects with him on a deeper erotic level than any woman he’s ever known. And yet, he can’t bring himself to fully commit to her: he’s too self-conscious about the gap between their ages to make their relationship fully public, too fully convinced about the inevitability of her leaving him, too irrationally jealous of her previous lovers. Plus, he has his other, more age-appropriate lover Carolyn (a surprisingly sensuous Patricia Clarkson), who he’s not quite prepared to give up either.

Elegy doesn’t try to replicate the urgent, stabbing qualities of Roth’s prose — there are none of Roth’s trademark, tortured arias of lust and guilt and self-recrimination and self-justification here. But Isabel Coixet (best known in Canada for directing the Sarah Polley tearjerker My Life Without Me) substitutes a meditative, autumnal mood of yearning and regret that’s just as potent and gripping. Elegy was written by Nicholas Meyer, who also wrote the script for The Human Stain, Hollywood’s previous attempt to put Roth onscreen, which never recovered from the fundamental miscasting of Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. No such problem exists in Elegy: Kepesh is easily Kingsley’s best role since Sexy Beast, and he nails every aspect of this man’s personality — the charming seducer, the man of intellect, the runaway father who refuses to apologize to his resentful son, the coward who lets love slip through his fingers.

Indeed, Elegy is a film about all the precious things that are so impossible to hang onto: love, beauty, health. All these characters are so vital, so hungry for life, and yet they’re all at a point in their lives where the spectre of death has begun whispering faintly to them. There’s an amazing, shockingly intimate scene where Kepesh visits his best friend George (Dennis Hopper), a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has suffered a stroke. Bedridden, unable to speak, and in great emotional tumult, George grabs Kepesh, pulls him close, and kisses him on the mouth. There’s nothing homoerotic about it; it’s a gesture of pure friendship, but of course, to Kepesh, it must also feel like being kissed by the grave.

Meanwhile, Penélope Cruz, wearing an incongruously girlish headband, disproves the popular critical notion that she can only give good performances in Spanish. The quiet, contemplative Consuela makes a nice contrast to the spitfire she plays in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Indeed, one can’t help but notice how much more nuanced and sexually sophisticated Elegy is compared to Allen’s recent work. Elegy feels refreshingly wise, adult, and professorial, while Allen, now in his 70s, still speaks with the voice of an undergrad.