"Water For Elephants" Review by Toronto Sun

"Water For Elephants" Review by Toronto Sun

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson, Christoph Waltz and Hal Holbrook. Directed by Francis Lawrence. 121 minutes. Opens April 22 at major theatres. PG

Robert Pattinson gazes adoringly into the eye of his beloved Rosie, caressing her as he does so, and for a moment it seems as if we’re watching a romance for the ages.

Except Rosie is an elephant, and the movie isn’t a Disney cartoon.

It’s Water for Elephants, Francis Lawrence’s plodding adaptation of Sara Gruen’s bestseller about emotional entanglements within a Depression-era circus.

You might call it a ménage à trunk, with Reese Witherspoon playing second fiddle to the more potent charms of Rosie, a stubborn fifty-something with a drinking problem. Rosie is played by real trunk-swinger Tai, whom Pattinson says he really did grow to love — and it shows.

Getting the perpetually glazed Pattinson to exhibit any kind of deep emotion is no mean feat. Best known as the brooding undead lover from the Twilight vampire series, he has an unfortunate habit of mimicking a corpse even in movies where blood and garlic aren’t at stake.

As Water for Elephants’ naïve Jacob, an orphaned veterinary student, he’s supposed to fall for another older woman, Witherspoon’s circus performer Marlena. There’s about 10 years’ difference between the two, on screen as in real life. Both are game, but the pulse between them approaches Dracula’s resting heart rate.

The listlessness is apparently contagious, affecting even the reliable Christoph Waltz. He plays circus ringleader August, the jealous and sadistic husband of Marlena, but he was far more animated as the ringleading Nazi Col. Landa in Inglourious Basterds.

This is an unfortunate deficit in a movie stuffed with superlatives. Water for Elephants, scripted by Richard LaGravenese (The Horse Whisperer), opens in current times with Hal Holbrook, 86, playing an octogenarian and nostalgic Jacob.

He barges into the affairs of big-top boss Charlie (Paul Schneider), promising to tell him the story of “the greatest circus disaster of all time.”

It happened in 1931, and the fictional circus in question was the Benzini Brothers, billed as “the most spectacular show on Earth.”

Buildups like that are hard to justify, and Water for Elephants fails to do so, but only on an emotional level. In visual terms it’s a crackerjack production, so steeped in circus lore that you can almost smell the sawdust, greasepaint and elephant dung.

Much of the action takes place aboard a moving train. Director Lawrence (I Am Legend) wastes no opportunity to take the camera outside, as in the scene where a skeptical August hires college-trained Jacob to be the circus vet. The two agree to terms after viewing the advancing landscape from atop the speeding vehicle.

Relations between the two men fray when it becomes apparent to the incendiary August that the terminally cool Jacob doesn’t have the stomach for the rough world of the circus. August abuses his workers, heaving unwanted ones off the train in a moving violation called “redlighting.”

He’s no better with animals. August believes that only beatings will keep recalcitrant Rosie in line (the film’s animal cruelty is fake but still graphic).

Pacifist Jacob believes that whispering sweet nothings is the better way to proceed. He adopts a similar approach in his ill-advised wooing of Marlena, whose name and blond mane are undoubtedly supposed to make us think of 1930s bombshell Marlene Dietrich.

It’s not a happy comparison for Witherspoon, who manages to be cute without being the least bit sexy. She’s a poor match for Pattinson, especially in a film meant to evoke 1930s melodramas like Polly of the Circus, in which Clark Gable played an upright minister to Marion Davies’ sexy trapeze artist.

That movie wasn’t much either, but at least Gable and Davies didn’t have to compete with a picture-pilfering pachyderm like Tai.

Source => Toronto Sun / Via => Thinking of Rob