“Elegy” movie reviewI’m getting really tired of devoting my time to unlikable movie characters. There are just too many of them these days. And after watching “Elegy” I feel like I just wasted two hours of my life with yet another main character I cared nothing about.
Ben Kingley plays a college professor living in New York City who lives one of those elite lifestyles we see too often in movies. He lives in a swanky Manhattan apartment, has a tenured professor dream job and spends most of his time hobnobbing at parties and being interviewed by people like Charlie Rose.
He’s self-centered, self-consumed and can see things only through the lens of his own intellect. He’s also emotionally stunted and has an estranged relationship with his son. And he’s carrying on a tryst with a workaholic academic played by Patricia Clarkson.
But his life is soon changed by one of his students.
Beautiful and flirty Penelope Cruz ends up in one of his classes. Kingsley is careful to follow a policy of not making advances on his students until the class is over. So at a post-semester party he asks Cruz out on a date. She agrees. They have an affair.
And it all seems pretty icky. Kingsley never seems to make a real connection with Cruz. She just seems like a living fetish out of one of the Goya paintings he admires. So there is not a lot of emotional connection to their relationship.
There are a lot of shots in bedrooms and on beaches until Kingsley makes a fatal blunder by distancing himself from her at a moment when she really needs him. He seems to like distance. Or he’s commitment-phobic. So the affair ends.
Kingsley then goes through one of those existentialist movie immobilizations. You know the cinematic cliché. There are many lonely shots of him in dark rooms and walking alone down city streets. When he finally comes out of his intellectual cocoon we’re somehow supposed to be moved by even just a slight concern toward other people.
Well I wasn’t moved. It was too little too late for me.
There was some real potential here for a story about a middle-aged man journeying out of selfishness. And someone who is evaluating his life by seeing a glimmer of youth and promise represented by Cruz. But Kingsley and the script play it too cold and too remote for us to really care about anything going on here.
Photo is courtesy Lakeshore Entertainment
