Having just seen his performance in this summer’s The Wackness, I’m pretty comfortable with the idea of Ben Kingsley playing a crotchety, vaguely horny old man. But for some reason, his brief makeout session with an Olsen twin in that movie (no, for real) sits better with me than the idea of a relationship between him and Penelope Cruz in the upcoming Elegy. The movie is based on the Phillip Roth novella The Dying Animal, and Kingsley plays a college professor who starts up a relationship with his sexy young student—Cruz, of course.
Roth is known for creating weird kinds of fantasy relationships in his novel, where men are constantly getting with women way out their league. To the movie’s benefit, it seems to regard the relationship with some degree of humor, at least as far as I can tell from watching this new trailer at Yahoo! Movies. Dennis Hopper plays the best friend of Kingsley’s character, who’s just as shocked as the rest of us that the woman sticks around for a relationship. For a movie called Elegy, the trailer contains an awful lot of humor.
But something tells me this can’t be all there is, so even though the trailer is more entertaining than I expected it to be, I remain unsure. After all, Variety called the movie “a meditation on lust and mortality,” so it’s not going to be all relationship comedy here. It could still be good, but I’m pretty sure this trailer is misleading. Check it out at Yahoo! Movies and tell me if I’m crazy.
