Relinquishing Roth: "Elegy" and the prerogatives of literary adaptation

I saw Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, a Nicholas-Meyer-scripted adapt­a­tion of Philip Roth’s short nov­el The Dying Animal, sev­er­al months ago, and was more than a little impressed with it in spite of the fact that, while in many ways faith­ful to its source, it was­n’t par­tic­u­larly Rothian. But the film, which opens in lim­ited release this Friday, was nev­er­the­less frank, funny, mov­ing, and pos­sessed a con­sist­ent but non-ostentatious intel­li­gence that’s extremely refresh­ing giv­en our cur­rent cine­mat­ic situ­ation. Both Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz gave per­form­ances that could cred­it­ably be called “brave,” and I say that as someone who gen­er­ally believes that char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion nev­er truly applies. 

But back to the Roth factor. In his review of the film today, New York magazine crit­ic David Edelstein says that “the film is so far is spir­it from its source…that I’m temp­ted to say we should aban­don alto­geth­er the idea of adapt­ing Roth.” I can­’t say he’s entirely off base here. In fact the paucity of Roth film adaptations—only four of his more than twenty nov­els, being Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, and The Dying Animal, have made it to the big screen—testifies to the dif­fi­culty his work presents in this area. I’d say of those four Elegy is the best film in a walk. Goodbye Columbus is not without charm, but that’s pretty much it; Ernest Lehman’s attempt at Portnoy’s Complaint rightly ranks as one of film’s most ridicu­lous dis­asters; and The Human Stain has too much of an air of the Distinguished Film about it, not that Elegy is entirely immune from that pecu­li­ar taint either.If Elegy has any value at all, it’s because Coixet does depart from Roth’s spir­it. That is, she’s taken a Roth text and made an Isabel Coixet film out of it. Roth is a scru­pu­lous chron­icler of that most unscru­pu­lous of states, desire; he dis­com­fits us with his pin­point por­tray­als of the urges and the agon­ies that attend it. Coixet, as shown in works such as My Life Without Me and The Secret Life of Words, is scru­pu­lous too, but she’s more of an overt human­ist than Roth. She’s hardly a sen­ti­ment­al­ist, but she’s of a gentler sens­ib­il­ity, and she tries to see the point of view of all her char­ac­ters in a way that Roth, who’s all about the sub­jectiv­ity of his prot­ag­on­ists, does­n’t neces­sar­ily feel obliged to. 

In his review, Edelstein muses, “I’d like to see Charlie Kaufman take a stab” at Roth, and I can see his point there, too—Kaufman’s a mas­ter of the bru­tal but some­times self-deluding obsess­ive exam­in­a­tion of self (I doubt that if Portnoy’s Complaint had not exis­ted, Kaufman would not have, either), with a gift for mordant/side-splitting humor to match. But this got me wool­gath­er­ing about who might be the ideal cine­mat­ic channel­er of Roth. Who, pos­sibly, could tackle his most careen­ingly scab­rous vis­ion, 1995’s Sabbath’s Theater? No one, by which I mean, no one film­maker. It would require some unholy hybrid of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, John Cassavettes, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. 

A pro­file of Kingsley, also in the cur­rent New York points up anoth­er issue. According to Coixet, Roth reques­ted that one of the cent­ral epis­odes of the book—the epis­ode of “the bite,” wherein prot­ag­on­ist David Kepesh treats erot­ic fix­a­tion Consuela like a blow-up doll, and she instinct­ively uses her teeth on him—“to be very graph­ic in the film.” Coixet recalls say­ing to Roth, “Look, I’m from Barcelona—I have no prob­lem with blow jobs—but people don’t want to see Penélope bit­ing his penis!” Roth even­tu­ally demured. Without neces­sar­ily intend­ing to, Coixet brings up a rather more cru­cial prob­lem apro­pos book-to-film adapt­a­tions: movie stars. Reading the sequence in the book, one is free to ima­gine Kepesh and Consuela as one will. The force of this scene registers via your own sub­jectiv­ity, maybe. But in film, what you’re see­ing is Penelope bit­ing Ben’s penis, just as the inter­net was flooded, sev­er­al months ago, with shots of Penelope’s breasts in this movie. That’s a big part of what com­prom­ises Robert Benton’s, yes, scru­pu­lous treat­ment of Roth’s The Human Stain—you nev­er actu­ally see the char­ac­ters, no mat­ter how hard the act­ors try. Rather, you see movie stars Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman try­ing really hard. Kingsely and Cruz don’t have to strain so much, as they’re play­ing char­ac­ters not quite so far removed from our images of them than what Hopkins and Kidman were going for. By keep­ing the actions of Kingsley and Cruz’s char­ac­ters reas­on­ably with­in the bound­ar­ies of “good” taste, Coixet relin­quishes Roth’s unspar­ing vis­ion, but buys a level of audi­ence acceptance. 

Is that a cop-out? Maybe so. Elegy does in fact for­sake Roth’s raw­ness from the title change on down. But, espe­cially giv­en the anti-adult bent of so many films these days, it provides ample enough rewards in exchange for it.