Elegy (2008) is very good, and for a limited audience. In telling the story of a womanizing, old professor who has an affair with a graduate student, the movie has some serious challenges to overcome. For one, we have to care enough about the encrusted old fart to care what happens to him and his relationships. Elegy attempts to create empathy by emphasizing not his talents or his erudition but rather his old age—we’ll all be there. If you cannot identify with that, you will have trouble caring about David (Ben Kingsley).
For another, we have to believe that this affair could happen and that it could have some substance. David’s growing obsession with Consuela Castilla (Penelope Cruz) is understandable in the sense that she is amazingly beautiful—plus, she has a complex personality we get glimpses of. She sometimes has the mystique of a person from another culture, and indeed the movie makes quite a deal of her being from Cuba.
But Elegy is about more than their 18-month affair. It is about David’s so-called “independence” and all of his relationships. Thus when the focus on Consuela ends, Elegy keeps the plot moving along with an encounter between David and his resentful son (Peter Sarsgaard), then the sudden illness and death of David’s best friend (Dennis Hopper), and then a conflict with David’s long-time lover (Patricia Clarkson). Slowly and painfully we see David become less self-centered, less selfish, and more accepting of his mortality.
While Elegy successfully meets numerous artistic challenges, it does not equal the sum of its parts. It is difficult to put your finger on why the well-made movie lacks punch. One problem is what Yvor Winters calls the fallacy of imitative form. That is, we have cerebral, closed, and subtle central characters who create a cerebral, closed, and subtle movie. It need not be that way. But I imagine Phillip Roth, who wrote the novel, would say that it is true to his upper-middle class academic characters.