An elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead. An elegy can also reflect on something that seems strange or mysterious to the author.  And so it is with Ben Kingsley as aging lothario David Kepesh, a reflection on the mysterious. The upset of his perfectly ordered life when beautiful Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz) comes crashing into it with a tender love causing him to question his shallow existence and opens up a gradual revealing of himself to be vulnerable no longer an impenetrable fortress against the world.  This dominos into his fractured relationship with his son, Kenny Kepesh (perfectly restrained acting by Peter Sarsgaard), his best friend George (Dennis Hopper) and his wife Amy (a well-acted cameo by Blondie’s Deborah Harry) carrying him further and further into reflection of the walls he has built.

Brilliant performances from Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard absorb you into their character’s lives. Long time old buddies on the same playing field – George and David (Hopper and Kingsley) engage you in banter. Consuela (Cruz) creates a power shift over lothario David with her sexual history and sensuality and brings you to tears in her final heartbreaking revelation. Patricia Clarkson as David’s always on the road business woman/mistress, lets in glimpses of the real loneliness in their 20 years of “just sex”. David and Kenny Kepesh (Sarsgaard) as estranged father and son find themselves on common ground (adultery) and inch toward a poignant closure of their broken past.

With a great script by Nicolas Myer based upon a Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal, Elegy is a brilliant and subtly directed film by Spanish director Isabel Coixet. This romantic drama beautifully caresses to the surface themes of growth, love and finding a place in the world for us out of a selfish, self-centred and lonely… one.

- Review by Eddie Crismani

Elegy opens in select Australian cinemas April 9th.