Variety
Sparse, low-budget drama, helmed by Spaniard Isabel Coixet, intelligently translates Roth's meditation on lust and mortality without soft-pedaling its narrator's brutally honest, unabashedly sexist views.
Full review
Elegy
Elegy charts the passionate relationship between a celebrated literary professor (Ben Kingsley) - who has a history of sleeping with his students - and young, shy Cuban-born beauty (Penelope Cruz) whose charm destabilises the professor. As the intimate connection transforms them, more than either could imagine, a charged sexual contest evolves into an indelible love story.
This meditation on lust and mortality is based on the novella The Dying Animal by Pulitzer Prize winning author Philip Roth and has a stellar cast including Kinglsey, Cruz, Dennis Hopper and Patricia Clarkson.
108 minsUSA
DramaRomance
- Director:
- Isabel Coixet ( 'My Life Without Me', 'The Secret Life of Words')
- Writer:
- Nicholas Meyer
- Cast:
- Penélope CruzBen KingsleyDennis HopperPatricia ClarksonPeter SarsgaardDeborah HarryCharlie Rose
Elegy / Reviews
Total Film
For a story about a man blinded by his own lust and a couple confronted with their own mortality, its emotional kick is strangely muted.
Full reviewThe New York Times
The problem with Elegy has nothing to do with faithfulness and everything to do with interpretation. The film is an overly polite take on a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel.
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Roger Ebert
By the time it's over, Penelope Cruz has slipped away with it, and transformed Kingsley's character in the process. It's nicely done.
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Los Angeles Times
Elegy seems determined to make real every ageist dig that could be thrown its way -- out of touch, balefully slow and, for a film at least partly about the zesty enterprise of sex, awfully lifeless.
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Hollywood Reporter
Cruz's performance deserves to be seen widely, and it should place her again in line for prizes, but the story's pretensions and downbeat mood will not endear the film to audiences.
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Empire Magazine
While the supporting actors are engaging, the turgid screenplay lets the whole thing down.
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