For Adults Only: A Brief History of Rothian Cinema

Originally posted August 7, 2008.

Consuela Castillo (Pénelope Cruz) chats with her professor David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) at a party at Kepesh’s Manhattan apartment.

Elegy
Directed by Isabel Coixet
Screenplay by Nicholas Meyer
With Ben Kingsley, Pénelope Cruz, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, and Deborah Harry

By Robert Rosen

The last time somebody made a good movie out of a Philip Roth book it was 1969 and Roth had just published Portnoy’s Complaint, the scandalous sensation that people talked about then the way they talk about Britney and Brangelina now. But the film that came out that year wasn’t Portnoy—it was Goodbye, Columbus, based on the title novella from Roth’s first book, published ten years earlier. The movie was a smash at the box office, and the critics, too, loved this Jewish-flavored, suburban, poor-boy-meets-rich-girl comedy. Directed by Larry Peerce and starring Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw, it’s perhaps best remembered for one of McGraw’s lines; when a friend asks her character, Brenda, what she’s doing over the summer, she says, “I’m growing a penis.”

Portnoy’s Complaint landed in theatres three years later. Again starring Benjamin, this time as North Jersey’s most creative onanist, the film didn’t come close to capturing the outrageousness of the novel’s obscenely hilarious monologue that Alexander Portnoy delivers to his psychiatrist.

As director Ernest Lehman ultimately realized, there was no good way to portray onscreen a compulsive adolescent masturbator, who, in the book’s most memorable scene, “fucks the family dinner,” a piece of raw liver.

So Lehman chose the sitcom route, and though at times he raised Portnoy to the realm of mildly amusing, the film, which also lacked the chemistry of Goodbye, Columbus’s Benjamin-McGraw pairing, was a critical and commercial disaster that served as a textbook example of why Roth’s novels—whose power is verbal rather than visual (as opposed to, say, Michael Crichton’s)—are so hard to turn into movies. Not counting a 1984 British made-for-TV version of The Ghost Writer, nobody would try again for 31 years.

But that belated attempt, The Human Stain, directed by Robert Benton, written by Nicholas Meyer, and starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, was at best a noble failure about morality and political correctness in the age of Clinton.

So here we are in 2008, and along comes director Isabel Coixet, a Spaniard, a woman, and presumably a Catholic—her best-known films are The Secret Life of Words and My Life Without Me—who, working with screenwriter Meyer (who must have learned something from The Human Stain), seems to have found the key to transforming Roth’s distinctly Jewish-American male sensibility into a film as literate and affecting as the novel it’s based on.

The Dying Animal, a slim work published in 2001, covers some familiar Rothian territory: The Roth-like narrator, commitment-shy college professor David Kepesh, tells the tragicomic tale of his obsession with a younger woman, Consuela Castillo, his student.

The film’s called Elegy, and it’s an erotically charged story that some people will describe as pornographic and others will flock to for the opportunity to feast their eyes on Pénelope Cruz’s voluptuous body and Patricia Clarkson’s brave little striptease. Against this tableaux of sexuality, Coixet explores with intelligence and realism such themes as aging, death, disease, and infidelity, making Elegy adult entertainment in the literal sense of those words, and creating an almost unbearable tension in the small dramatic moments, such as when Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) asks Consuela (Cruz) out on a date.

The plot (set in New York but filmed in a distractingly inauthentic-looking Vancouver) traces the complications of David’s relationships with Consuela, a levelheaded Cuban from a wealthy, conservative family; George (Dennis Hopper), his friend and colleague, an aging beat poet; George’s wife, Amy (a small but substantial role for Deborah Harry, here looking all of her 63 years); Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), his longstanding girlfriend, who spends most of her time in Seattle and whose only demand is that Kepish not, as she puts it, fuck other women; and Kenny (Peter Sarsgaard), his semi-estranged son, a doctor who’s facing his own infidelity issues.

Elegy is by no means perfect, but it would be nitpicking to argue that Consuela needs to be more fleshed out (so to speak), or that David is too serious at times, or that George seems like a bit of a caricature.

All I will say is that 39 years is too long to wait for a good Philip Roth movie, and I can only hope that Coixet and Meyer team up for another one soon. May I suggest Sabbath’s Theatre?