Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
The
Creepy Buds of May
(Venus, 3/5/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
I
make it a practice not to pay too much attention to award shows. It
must be said, however, that the news of Oscar passing over Peter O'Toole
for (yes, count it) the eighth time has some troubling implications.
Apparently, O'Toole's performance in Venus as a septuagenarian
womanizer who takes an amiably randy interest in a woman a quarter his
age was too "creepy" for some Academy voters. 2006 Best Actor
award-winner Forest Whitaker, meanwhile, portrays a blood-soaked African
dictator. So this is where our society is on issues of morality and
sex: murder on a vast scale is all in good fun, but old guys pining
for young flesh is simply too much to stomach.
No matter. O'Toole delivers a performance
in Venus that is not only superb, but that amounts to something
of a revelation. Through much of his career, O'Toole has been associated
with a powerful but stagey kind of acting, characterized by the kind
of stentorian declamations you can hear from the back seat of any theater
(or, in the case of Lawrence of Arabia, across miles of sand
dunes). But as Maurice, the "scientist of the female art"
and over-the-hill actor who lately specializes in playing corpses, O'Toole
is subtle, silky, and charming. In this sense, this may be the most
intimate, most truly cinematic of his many performances on film.
All this is in the service of a
script by Hanif (My Beautiful Launderette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid)
Kureishi that barely ever rings false. The opportunities for true creepiness
are there, of course, but Kureishi rightly observes that May can exploit
December just as well as the reverse. The object of Maurice's attentions
(Jodie Whittaker) is less objectivized by them as she is humanized.
The script's most subversive theme is not romance across the decades,
but the possibility of real connection despite our world's generational
apartheid in sexual matters. The only sour note is the prostate operation
Kureishi gives Maurice, apparently for no other purpose but to make
his ardor seem less threatening.
Jodie Whittaker is terrific as Jessie,
the leggy vulgarian. With her sharp elbows and close-set eyes, she's
not a conventional beauty but more interesting. Her chemistry with O'Toole
doesn't seem like acting: as she slurps soda or slumps in front of the
tube, she inspires a delight in him that takes decades off his blasted
face.
To return to the Oscars (which,
as you know, I don't pay attention to): praising O'Toole is not meant
to suggest that Forest Whitaker didn't deliver a fine performance in
The Last King of Scotland. What makes O'Toole better, however,
is the degree of difficulty: where Amin's flamboyant persona was basically
handed to Whitaker, O'Toole takes a basically unsympathetic type—the
dirty old man—and turns it into a poignant, unmissable portrait.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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