Moviegoing:
Water For Elephants
Friday, 29 April 2011
Francis Lawrence’s Water For Elephants is a very old-fashioned movie at heart — and on its sleeve as well. The darkness of life in the circus has been a movie trope since Freaks; you might almost say that movies were invented not so much take us behind the scenes as to persuade us that we want to go behind the scenes. All the glamor that circus performers know, after all, they know when they don their spangly costumes and perform. The rest is rehearsal or worse. (Tightrope artists don’t go out on the town after the show.) So why would anyone want to peer into the world of underpaid drudgery on the other side of the canvas?
The answer is, “nobody but a kid who dreams of running away with the circus.” Jacob Jankowski doesn’t run away with the circus, exactly, but when he does run away — from the void left by his loving parents’ sudden death in an automobile accident — it’s a circus train that he hops on to. Having left Cornell within an inch of graduating as a veterinarian, Jacob brings some useful skills to his new berth; as an Ivy Leaguer, he brings a gentlemanly polish that the manager and master of ceremonies finds congenial — until, of course, the manager’s wife responds to his ardent glances, whereupon the manager’s sideline as a sadist takes over. Or is it the plot of I Pagliacci? Mo matter, because — and this is what’s really old-fashioned about Water For Elephants — the film is not about the circus at all. It’s about the rescue of a lovely woman by a pure-hearted young man. And it is set in the distant past, when even roustabouts were better-dressed than most people today.
I’m going to have to see Water For Elephants a few more times before I can tell if it’s any good. Reese Witherspoon, as I say, is the reason to hold out hope. Her Marlena — an abandoned child, raised in a hell of foster homes until her escape into the circus manager’s arms — shimmers with luminous waves of goodness even when her face is set with hard smarts. When Marlena strikes her triumphant poses atop Rosie, the elephant that her husband buys in order to buoy up the circus’s fortunes, you see someone who is very pleased to be doing something well. Christoph Waltz, as August, the manager, looks perhaps too pleased to be doing what he’s doing; no one brings a more enthusiastic, authoritative glitter to the art of cruelty. What saves his performances from seeming typecast is the fact that Water For Elephants is nowhere near as much fun as Inglorious Basterds, the Quentin Taratino fable in which Mr Waltz stole every scene in which he appeared. As for Robert Pattison, the vampire heart-throb who plays Jacob, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s he who’s the mess or his part, which may have undergone unfortunate tailoring to suit the actor’s fan base. Mr Pattison has dreamy eyes, a great smile, and the frame of a genuine Hollywood Everyman. But his wounded air may not wear well; he too often seems too debilitated to withstand the hardships of circus life. It may be that his career needs a fatal accident that will seal him in imperishable amber.