Director Isabel Coixet adapts Philip Roth’s novella The Dying Animal in Elegy, a stuffy and morose drama about a college professor who develops a serious bout of lovesickness after bedding a beautiful woman. The professor is played by Ben Kingsley in snooty erudite mode and the beautiful woman is freshly Oscar-minted belle Penélope Cruz. On paper they make a formidable duo but Coixet’s direction does neither actor any favours: gloomy, drab and flatly executed, Elegy is a hard to like film populated by hard to like characters.

Leader of the hard-to-like pack is pompous author/professor David Kepesh (Kingsley), the kind of highbrow type for whom the term ‘ivory tower’ was coined. We learn through David’s leave-nothing-unstated voiceover – a hackneyed device presumably lifted right out of Roth’s pages and employed heavily and shamelessly – that he has “always been vulnerable to female beauty,” meaning all the books, essays, lectures and expensive whiskey haven’t diminished his libido. This revelation paves the way for a relationship with one of his students – the lovely Consuela Castillo (Cruz), who agrees to go with David to the theatre and a spark-less romance ensures between them, irrespective of their 30-odd-year age gap.

Coixet doesn’t beat around the bush and the story opens briskly: twenty minutes in and the sleazily savant shiny-headed Kingsley has already unbuttoned Cruz’s shirt; we assume this scene is all he needed to sign on the dotted line. Kingsley is a great actor but here he’s reduced to a puddle of watery emotions and it’s difficult to accept that David, weak and aggravating though he is, can have his cool-headedness and acerbity expunged so quickly and crushingly. In one scene Consuela, sitting up topless, asks him what he thinks of her breasts. “Do you like them?” she says. This is the moment most human beings would probably respond with something flippant – something about the Pope being a Catholic, say – but David has to lay it on thick. “I worship them,” he says, po-faced, a heartbeat later adding “and you’ve got a beautiful face,” then “you’re a work of art!” and finally “a real work of art!” Unfortunately for everybody involved, the film is not.

George (a restrained Dennis Hopper) explains to David his theory that all gorgeous women are invisible to men – that men, blinded by beauty, cannot see their true selves. Coixet may be proving the same can apply to films, as her direction is equally distracted by Cruz’s natural aesthetic. Consuela is introduced as a symbol of beauty, an object of lust and desire, and the film firmly places her in this context. Facing off against uninteresting dialogue and a screen-hogging Kinglsey, Cruz is unable bust out of the box and cannot create a strong character in a role that demanded one. When a dramatic event triggers the third act, finally and crudely ripping Cruz away from her image as a straitlaced beautiful woman, Elegy needed Consuela to be capable of meaningfully conveying heavy emotions. It fails badly because she is not.

Consuela’s shortcomings place more emphasis on David, an unlikeable character who bores despite his many foibles: adultery, pomposity, selfishness, conceit, baldness; the list goes on. A large chunk of the story consists of David wiping the drool from his mouth (OK – that’s metaphoric) then reciting a variation of “I want you so much.” It’s sad to see Kingsley, such a formidable talent, reduced to moosh so quickly and unceremoniously. You could argue this sort of treatment is undignifying for the great man but then again we’re talking about an actor who recently completed shooting Prince of Persia: The Movie. Regardless, anyone who can recall the plastic bag scene from House of Sand and Fog – and anyone who’s seen that film will remember it – can understand that Kingsley is capable of turning indignity into an art form. In Elegy, however, his powers are extremely limited.

One of the film’s better scenes has George berating David, harping on about how he’s endured too much of his whining and navel-gazing. “You owe me big time,” Hopper grumbles, and the audience understand exactly where he’s coming from.

Elegy’s Australian theatrical release: 9 April 2009