Elegy

Movie producers wisely concluded that you can't make a great movie from a Phillip Roth novel because the quality of his books is in their effusive language and the minds of the characters that produce it. So most of his books, like Saul Bellow's, are unfilmed; and those that have been have fallen considerably short of their source (e.g., The Human Stain). You can see where we're headed with Elegy when you remember that the title of the source novella is The Dying Animal. This is pasteurized Roth and doesn't capture verbose despair of those bleak pages. Ben Kingsley is oddly cast (he's a Brit--from Oxford no less--and nobody'sa Brit in Roth), but he is always worth watching. Penelope Cruz is also very good. Kingsley's character tells Cruz she has the most beautiful breasts in the world, and we are provided ample evidence to support that hypothesis in the film. Dennis Hopper, fresh from his gig selling retirement planning in commercials, plays Kingsley's poet friend who dispenses advice on matters of the heart like you would expect to hear from an insurance salesman. Still, it's a fairly satisfying and unusual melodrama with good performances and some vestigial remains of Roth's more challenging original.