Film

After Robert Benton’s flatulent take on The Human Stain (2003), it’s kind of startling to see a Philip Roth adaptation that just stands up and acts like a movie. (It’s even by the same screenwriter, Nicholas Meyer.) The subject, as in Roth’s 2001 novella The Dying Animal, is David Kepesh (Kingsley), a comprehensively pompous literature professor and sometime New Yorker theater critic whose lone course exists as little more than a pretext to seduce the swooning young lasses. He holds an end-of-term party, tells prospective conquests they resemble the women in Velazquez paintings—and presto. But he can’t quite figure out Consuela Castillo (Cruz, not exactly convincing as 24), the first lover with whom he might actually be in love.

Elegy for whom? Not Kepesh. Roth’s original title, nodding to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” would have been more appropriate—particularly since Kingsley, who owns this movie, seems to have approached each scene with the self-direction “You’re a beached whale.” Subplots involving Kepesh’s other lover (Clarkson) and estranged son (Sarsgaard) overemphasize his misanthropy, and Hopper, as Kepesh’s poet colleague, once again proves he’s simultaneously a national treasure and a total embarrassment. But Elegy sneaks up on you anyway—even overacted, Roth’s intelligence shines through.