Winter-Spring, 2009
For my mother, it's fortune tellers; she consults them to have her hopes confirmed. For me, it's movies, literature, theatre.
Tonight I saw Elegy, with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley. I'd read about it in the New Yorker over the summer, and the reviewer had classed it within a minor genre of movies about academics, noting that usually the type is portrayed as genial, somewhat bumbling, generally harmless. He also noted that in recent years a different, less benign portrait had emerged — combative (The Squid & the Whale) or aging icon (Starting Out in the Evening). Elegy falls into the latter category, with the added frisson of carnality.
An intellectual who's built his reputation on critiquing social mores, David Nekesh (Ben Kingsley) is a man who prizes freedom and independence above all. He arranges his life in order to be free of entanglements. Sex comes in the form of occasional encounters with an attractive former student (gamely played by Patricia Clarkson) close to his age, equally attached to detachment. Exercise is provided via regular games of squash with George O'Hearn (Dennis Hopper), prize-winning poet and fellow cynic who nevertheless remains married, serial infidelities notwithstanding.
Into Nekesh's sterile orbit strays Consuelo (Penelope Cruz), a young Cuban woman determined to achieve her parents' dream of academic success. David's credentials, his apparently boundless command of all things cultural and artistic ensnare Consuelo, who is not so much tabula rasa as emotionally porous. She has the misfortune to fall in love with David, and to expect a response from him. When he inevitably fails her by standing her up at her graduation party, she is crushed and the affair from which David has long sought to extricate himself is over. He consoles himself at her loss by accepting O'Hearn's invitation to introduce him at a high profile reading, only to have this emotional pillar pulled from under when O'Hearn collapses onstage. His friend's eventual degeneration and death leave David depleted, somewhat lost, but not so vulnerable as to unseat his carefully cultivated stance of detachment.
In a somewhat surprising turn of events, Consuelo contacts David shortly after O'Hearn's death. She wants to meet him in order to relate what cannot be said otherwise. After he agrees and she comes up to his apartment as of old, Consuelo reveals that she is sick with cancer, and that she has to have an operation that will remove her breasts. She challenges David who was smitten with her body to be as enthralled with her following surgery. She comes to him to be photographed; she wants him to picture her as she was, as she wants to be for him, perfect.
The scene is heartbreaking; earlier the poet insists that "beautiful women are invisible." David protests it's impossible, yet the poet persists: "we don't see the woman, we are blinded by her physical beauty." As Penelope Cruz stares unblinkingly at David, camera in hand, slowly and deliberately removing her clothes to reveal her beautiful breasts, she dares David to look at her and see her at last, all of her.
Later in the hospital after the operation, David listens to Consuelo regret how much of her life she feels she's wasted. He does not contradict her, but simply affirms his presence. It is the closest he comes to giving of and revealing himself. Despite the melodrama of Consuelo's reappearance and sickness-unto-death, Elegy is no latter day Love Story. Her death isn't the "point" of the story; it's the catalyst for David's long-delayed maturity. Yet the ending is inconclusive. We are back at the beach where David and Consuelo had gone earlier, where David had promised to take Consuelo, to reveal the great cities of Europe to her. Sensibly, perhaps knowingly, Consuelo demurs. This time the sky is overcast, and the lovers have their backs to us. Is this a flashback to earlier times, or a flash forward to a hoped for future?
Like The Savages earlier this year and Venus last year, Elegy looks at how we put off growing up/growing old by refusing to recognize our age. In Elegy, David's elixir is zipless fucks, the promise of eternal youth (or at least the staying of age) through a lifetime of arrested adolescence. The poet alludes to this when he challenges David to admit to their both engaging in endless immaturity. He also reveals, surprisingly, that he and his long-suffering wife have now, despite each other, discovered one other anew. For all David's vaunted need for unfettered experience and independence, this kind of intimacy eludes him. But not entirely. At the end in Consuelo's hospital room, David finally lets down his guard enough to let Consuelo in.
