Dignity and Sensuality: Intoxicationby gradyharp

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March 20, 2009: 'When you make love to a woman you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life.'

Few American writers have been able to examine the fear and rage and desperation of aging as eloquently as Philip Roth, and as with another of his novels brought to life on the screen ('The Human Stain'), here Nicholas Meyer has beautifully adapted Roth's 'The Dying Animal' with all the visceral immediacy and poetry of the novel about the terror and compassion of May/December relationships. Isabel Coixnet has managed to guide her gifted set of actors through this story as though it were a ballet. The result is one of the more beautiful 'love stories' ever filmed.

David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley, in a performance of tremendous power and sensitivity) is an aging author, teacher and art critic, a man who has not learned the secret of lasting relationships but who retains his animal sex drive despite his passing years: he survives time's passing by a patterned assignation with Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), an aging successful traveling business woman who drops in for sensual gratification when in town. David's closest friend is Pulitzer prize winning poet George O'Hearn (Dennis Hopper) who serves as his alter ego and as his confidant in David's problematic life.

Into David's classroom comes Consuela Castillo (the ravishingly beautiful and gifted Penélope Cruz) who gains David's focus not only for her radiant beauty but also for her intelligence. Struggling with his advanced years (David is over thirty years older than Consuela), a courtship dance begins and it is the emergence of this romance that forms the story. How Consuela alters David's behavior and his discovery of the need for connection outside of the bedroom is related as a journey through David's mind. The manner in which the transformation changes every member of the story is what makes this film so very memorable.

Kingsley is brilliant in this probing examination of the aging man's psyche, Cruz SHOULD have received her Oscar for this performance rather than the film that honored her, Clarkson continues to be one of our best actresses on the screen, Peter Sarsgaard makes a brief but important appearance, and David Hopper manages to step out of his predictable past roles and offer a character of true compassion and finesse. The film is magnificently photographed (Jean-Claude Larrieu) and the music score thankfully is almost completely devoted to the works of Erik Satie (Gnossiennes), Beethoven (Diabelli Variations), Vivaldi (cantatas with Phillipe Jaroussky) -all edited by the director Isabel Coixnet. It all works well. This is one of the finer films of 2008 and deserves a wide audience of people who love quality filmmaking. Grady Harp