Review: Elegy

From the author “The Origins of American Hedonism” comes a new book on “the Hugh Hefner of the Puritans.” Columbia University prof David Kepesh charms Charlie Rose and beds coeds. American novelist Philip Roth describes the further misadventure of his frequent protagonist in his novel, “The Dying Animal.” And Sir Ben Kingsley plays him as a caustic, self-lacerating rake. This bald egghead looks like a two-legged penis. As if Viagra went straight to his head, his bulging eyeballs pop for former student Consuela Castillo Penélope Cruz (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”). Director and camera operator Isabel Coixet (“My Life Without Me”) frames Kepesh in the company of Roland Barthes’ “The Pleasure of the Text.” Vulgarizing lit-crit, screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, who also adapted Roth’s earlier prof novel “The Human Stain,” reads a woman’s body as a manuscript of male anxiety about mortality. Consuela’s breast cancer—a wretched trick in the third act—is shown as more her former prof’s tragedy than her own. This highbrow melodrama is salvaged by fine work by Patricia Clarkson as Kepesh’s longtime bedmate when business brings her to New York, Dennis Hopper as Kepesh’s Pulitzer-Prize winning poet sidekick and squash partner and Peter Sarsgaard as Kepesh’s pissed-off son. The ugly lighting lends an icky sheen, but this seems not meant to cast Roth’s apology for an Ivy League lech in a bad light. With Deborah Harry, Sonja Bennett and Charlie Rose. 106m. (Bill Stamets)