Elegy (2008)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This film Elegy which is adapted from Philip Roth's novel entitled "The Dying Animal" provides a tale of thought-provoking obsession as it deeply explores the relationship between a respected professor and a gorgeous graduate student.Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz stars in this movie directed by Spanish director Isable Coixet. Dennis Hopper,Peter Sarsgaard and Patricia Clarkson co-star.David Kepesh is a professor that is experiencing sexual freedom like no other single or married man around.Being previously married and now single,his encounters with women are brief,casual and sexual.Added to that,he is also in a casual 20-year relationship with a former student Caroline.One time,his best friend Pulitzer Prize-winning poet George O'Hearn suggest to him to get married to enjoy having a wife and keep the other sexual encounters around.Then he meets Consuela Castillo,an extremely gorgeous student and starts having encounters with her.But he instead enters a serious relationship with her and the circumstances surrounding them become extremely challenging particularly since his idea of liberation and sexual freedom are put on a test in it.This was an intelligently drama about a male fantasy that would provide insights on love,romance,sexual freedom and liberation.Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz did a wonderful job on portraying David and Consuelo respectively as well.Both thespians are really wonderful in the sense that one would feel for their love for one another and their committed relationship with each other.It was also nice to see the changes they are willing to undergo and the things they would give up to be with one another.Added to that,we are presented with the theme of love and romance and how true love truly conquers everything in this modern world of ours.

Poorly cast movie Penelope Cruz comes across as a complete airheadShe is so superficial and unauthentic as can be this is Hollywood at its worstTotally self indulgentCruz has no on screen chemistry what so everThis was movie that had some potential but the direction in consort with the shallowness of Crus acting made it a wasteShe can't play a school girl at all it is laughable and a waste of timeHer character is completely affective dull and blandThere is no way the Kingsley character could find her attractive

Ben Kingsley plays the part of 60ish (in two different respects) author, social critic, and professor David Kepesh convincingly enough, and Penelope Cruz truly shines as Consuela Castillo, a student from Cuba who becomes his lover immediately after grades have been posted. I started to get bored during the middle portions and almost quit watching. Yet, there is a quietly compelling quality to this film that caused me to stay with it. While there's not much in the way of reversals or dramatic action, ELEGY is about real people confronting common dilemmas regarding beauty, aging, and mortality. The dialogue is elegant and meaningful; nevertheless, it's nothing larger-than-life: Just about anyone will be able to relate to the obsessions, suspicions, and tender moments that haunt this romance. The cover and title make it look awfully sad but, while it's no comedy per se, it's often funny and generally far less melancholy than it could have been. There's also some sex, although ELEGY's nothing that many people would want to sit through just for a cheap thrill.On the down-side, the relationship between Castillo and Kepesh is hard to buy in places, and it all seems to happen just a bit too quickly and easily. The fact that he's much older than her is obviously a critical part of the story, but what she really sees in him is never made entirely clear. Still, the good acting, filming, and everything else will probably make it easy enough for most people to at least partially suspend disbelief.

As many of the reviewers on this page have noted, the movie "Elegy" is beautifully filmed, stunningly acted, and ferociously under-motivated. It is the story of a much older professor and his much younger student, who pass through each other's lives with minimal emotional contact with each other and virtually none to engage the viewer. I find both characters superficial, foggy, and distant. Is that the point of the film? Penelope Cruz is pretty, fresh, and shallow. What does the professor, Ben Kingsley, see in her? A diversion only? His rhetoric promises more, but what? He is pompous, cold, old, and filled with NYC intellectual abstractions that are thinly disguised veils for his creepy (read "cultural critic") narcissism. Is she simply deluded in her interest in him and he so "self-individuated" as to be rigidly remote? Where is real feeling here? As for story structure, two deus-ex-diseases--Hopper's stroke and her cancer--are more than my tolerance for fatalistic sentimentality can bear. At the end, when she is dying (I presume) of her disease and the professor crawls into her bed at the hospital, it would not surprise me if Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw joined them.