Starring Peter O'Toole, Leslie Phillips, Jodie Whittaker, Vanessa Redgrave.
Directed by Roger Michell.
In Venus, Peter O'Toole's eyes still glitter with curiosity despite a body that's near-cadaverous and a face that's unnervingly skull-like. And that curiosity mingles splendidly with arousal when his character, the aging British actor Maurice Russell, claps those orbs on a sullen, barely literate teenager named Jessie (Jodie Whittaker). Maurice responds at once to the banked energy that some adolescents exude simply lolling on the sofa. Jessie responds in her own slow and surly way to his appreciation. The movie follows their May-December - make that March-December - semi-romance with an observant and unruly wit that overflows with insight about growing up and growing old.
Venus has been so deftly crafted to showcase its great cast that it's tempting to give them all the credit for the film's unlikely and exhilarating success as an Educating Rita meets Lolita. And O'Toole is phenomenal. He never begs for sympathy or adds an undue quaver to his mellifluous voice. His body is a close-to-toppling tree. What holds it up is his robust soul. O'Toole keeps creative distance from the character, so that we see Maurice in all his charm and fallibility. At the same time, he rouses a spirit of affirmative gaiety that emanates from his own essence as a performer and a man.
But director Roger Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi are the ones who've made it possible to embrace O'Toole's risky characterization wholeheartedly and without embarrassment. In Venus they've composed an unsentimental paean to Maurice's kind of male desire: a desire that doesn't quit and lasts a lifetime.
What Maurice preserves to the end is his devotion to experience pleasure and give it. And in the filmmakers' view this generosity can vitalize anyone who is receptive to it or even just enters its orbit. The movie has none of that awful, meaningless middle-class pseudo-niceness that's merely the flip side of hatefests like Notes on a Scandal. Michell and Kureishi ignite O'Toole's ability to convey insatiable ardor, then follow where that ardor leads, consequences be damned.
Jessie enters Maurice's life as the grandniece of Ian (Leslie Phillips), his skittish best friend. Ian fantasized that Jessie would be a refined, eager-to-learn caregiver, cooking up a nice piece of fish, then savoring Bach's St. Matthew's Passion over dinner. Jessie dreams of swigging beer and watching reality TV. Of course, Ian is appalled. But Maurice nicely taps the vitality hidden in her petulance. He leaps at any chance to take her off Ian's hands. She wants to go into "modeling," though her uncouth accent makes it sound like "yodeling." So Maurice gets her a job posing nude for art students. (Unfortunately, he must leave class because he breaks her concentration.) He makes no secret of his love for her - and he calls it love, not lust - even though, because of medication and prostate surgery, he can take what he calls only "a theoretical interest" in her sexuality.
Michell and Kureishi don't minimize the welter of confused feelings this sets off in Jessie and the audience. She's annoyed, amused, amazed, flustered, angry, chagrined and capable of pinching or hitting Maurice mercilessly. Yet something genuine passes between them. Maurice sounds her depths of feeling and catalyzes the authentic devotion that may be the most selfless form of love. And at the end, when Jessie assumes a classic pose, you know she's completely self-possessed like the models whose forms adorn museums.
There's no more moving vignette on the big screen today than Maurice declaiming Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate" after hearing Jessie tell him of emotional abuse. Unless, that is, it's the scene of Jessie reading Shakespeare's Sonnet XXVII to Maurice - "Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed" - not understanding the words, but speaking them lovingly, because she knows how important the poem is to him. She has not only seen the potential in his love; it has also led her to see the potential in herself.
To give pleasure, of course, is not only a hedonist's ideal, but an actor's. And Venus gets to what makes actors glorious when they're at their ease. They expose petty vanities and profound virtues simultaneously. Maurice, Ian and a third friend, Donald (Richard E. Griffiths), meet at a cafe every morning. They scour the obituaries for mention of their mates, note the pictures and column size, treat death notices as if they were final reviews. Their fatuity and neediness are only slight exaggerations of our own.
Maurice has three kinds of marriages in Venus, and the movie is frank and adult about each. With Ian, Maurice evinces a pure, sturdy affection that transcends embarrassment even when he's clipping his pal's toenails; Phillips is superbly, comically fussy as Ian, but when he and Maurice sway to music they express the height of fellow-feeling. When Maurice is with his ex-wife, Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave), he shares a rugged mountain range of emotion, all craggy peaks and pitlike valleys. Redgrave has an almost psychic empathy in the role. And with Jessie, Maurice feels totally connected to life even when he's knocking on hell or heaven's door. Part of what makes their scenes so alive is Whittaker's embodiment of instinct and growth.
Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen. But it's also a salute to the male animal. Even when Maurice gets knocked, he's down, never out. And even when he is down for the count, his vitality ripples out to his family and friends.
At one point, Maurice, powdered and bewigged for a period film, barely gets out "When it comes to love, men ... " before the hot lights and heavy costume get to him. The sight of Jessie watching him revives him. And the film finishes the sentence for him: When it comes to love, it says, men are both wholly fools and holy fools.
IF People magazine declared a "Sexiest Man Semi-Alive," the cover boy would be the noble-browed, the twinkling, the indispensable Peter O'Toole. He may be as old as water, but his frail magnificence is the sun orbited by "Venus," a sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films.
O'Toole's Maurice is a crumbling London actor whose comrade in decrepitude (Leslie Phillips) announces that his niece's daughter Jessie, an aspiring model from provincial England, is coming to stay with him in an effort to keep him upright. The way Maurice tries to scrape together the final remaining joules of life force to get a peek at Jessie's nude body while issuing lapidary quips suggests a unique merging of sensibilities: part National Lampoon, part Royal Shakespeare Company. He wants to ravage her the way time has ravaged him.
After he appears in a TV show, his estranged wife (her excellency Vanessa Redgrave) asks, "What were you playing?" Maurice says, "A corpse, more or less." "Typecast again," says the wife. When he recalls leaving her with three small kids for a sightly co-star, he remarks, "I rather left you holding the baby. I can see it must have been . . . inconvenient."
Like that sentence, the movie is a jewel of understatement, of saying without saying. Hanif Kureishi's beautiful script also deals paradox and reversal, like Oscar Wilde with a heart. Maurice doesn't reveal he's had surgery because "I hate sympathy." His chum responds, "But you wouldn't have got any from me." "I know!" says Maurice. "You're a true friend." Jessie, meanwhile, has her own ex, who "stopped being kind. He went the other way. A long way that way."
Jessie is played by a newcomer named Jodie Whittaker, who could easily have been washed away by the tidal force of her co-stars, who also include "History Boys" star Richard Griffiths as another worm-eaten wit. But Whittaker is incandescent. With her strange northern dialect (she won't model nude because "I'm not letting anyone I know see me chuffs and bumps") and the way she lets a compliment be reflected across her face before quickly resetting her features to sullen mistrust, she creates the fire that Maurice dances around like a caveman. If she isn't Beauty herself, she'll do.
What makes this film the perfect career nightcap for Peter the great is the nimbus of rakish doom he has always cultivated. The first time most of us saw him, he was dying in a motorcycle crash at the beginning of "Lawrence of Arabia at 36, he was a hoary Henry II gaming his and Britain's legacy in "The Lion in Winter four years later, he played a guy who enjoyed crucifying himself in "The Ruling Class."
Daring gave way to comic delicacy; a few years ago he, or his shade, tottered onto the David Letterman show, terrified, atop a camel. He followed with a mad prophecy, initially declining an honorary Oscar because he intended to "win the lovely bugger outright." Now that time has come.
In his memoir, "Loitering With Intent," the cover photo of which pops up in "Venus," O'Toole discusses a picture of himself as a little boy that "shows a grave, sweet child all golden-topped, easy, creamy as a cherub, gazing at the world with a deep, peaceful calm." Today, his skin is whiskey-cured parchment and his gold has been stolen. But Peter O'Toole is immortal.
Do I really have to urge you to see "Venus" when you can practically hear Peter O'Toole delivering one of the great limelight performances of all time from where you're sitting? This roistering, legendary star -- half artist, half peat-smoked ham -- hasn't had a real lead role since 1982's "My Favorite Year," so anything that puts him above the title deserves attention. Yet O'Toole does so much with the part of Maurice Russell, a fading London actor and proudly dirty old man, that you ache for 25 years of missed opportunities.
The film itself is a slight yet incisive character study, the sort of thing that would dissolve into whimsy if hands weren't steady all around. The writer, though, is Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette" and onward) and the director is Roger Michell ("Notting Hill"), and their hands are quite steady if not very subtle. The two collaborated last on "The Mother," an absorbing, upsetting 2003 drama about a 60 -something grandmother in love with a young man. "Venus" is a deceptively cheeky bookend to that film.
Maurice, when we meet him, is a frail working thespian in his 70s. He takes soap operas, commercials, whatever he can get, and has his daily morning crumpet with a longtime acting friend, Ian (Leslie Phillips). The two talk shop and tease each other about stage roles they played centuries ago in their youth.
Ian, who seems more decrepit than his compatriot, has hired a country grand-niece to come look after him. Her name is Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), and she's a horror: a gum-snapping, 22-year-old couch potato with the blank stare of a cow. Yet Maurice takes one look and falls head over heels, and "Venus" asks us to consider where geezer lust might overlap into something like mutual respect, even love.
Jessie is properly creeped out by this buzzard, but she's fascinated by him as well. Maurice pays attention to her, listens to her, and when he's not listening he talks at her with the plummy, oracular wit that has made him a lifelong stage star and world-class womanizer. It's a well-rehearsed seduction, his favorite role, and does it matter that it's pathetic if it's probably his last? (You're allowed to say yes.)
"Venus" is rollickingly funny at times -- a sequence in which the old reprobate talks Jessie into posing for his life-study art class ends with a moment of pure slapstick -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness. Maurice may pity himself but the movie is pitiless toward him while still managing to love him very much. The filmmakers and O'Toole are all attuned to the ick factor, and when Maurice hovers over his beloved's creamy shoulder, he's meant full well to seem vampiric. Also romantic, deluded, and human.
As the central relationship progresses, and as the hero moves from practiced smoothness to an old man's folly to a small sort of wisdom, we see him drop the acting and, at last, confront some of the damage he has left. Maurice has an ex-wife, a onetime actress named Valerie, played by an unrecognizable Vanessa Redgrave with the calm of a woman who has survived marriage to a beautiful, self-absorbed man. Children are mentioned but we never see them: Some burned bridges can't be rebuilt.
Redgrave does little and is intensely moving for it; likewise Phillips (a much-loved British movie veteran) tickles the heart with his cranky insistence on a well-cooked haddock. The scene in which he and O'Toole share a waltz at death's door (it's actually the Actors' Church, St. Paul's in Covent Garden, with its plaques to the likes of Boris Karloff and Noel Coward) can move you to simultaneous laughter and tears.
The unknown Whittaker holds her own in this company; watch her expression when Maurice describes to her the most beautiful thing a woman will ever see, and you'll realize in retrospect how strong her performance is. "Venus" is about old age, though, and O'Toole confronts every bit of pain and fear to be found there. On a technical level he's astounding -- step by step he conveys the character's failing body -- but the role is most affecting for what it says about a legend, an actor, and a man.
How close is Maurice Russell to the person playing him? It's immaterial and, at the same time, inextricable from the movie's pleasure and meaning. O'Toole offers lucid commentary here on the joys of art and flesh, perhaps on the grand fun he has had being Peter O'Toole, and, finally, on the colossal unfairness of the game coming to a close. When Maurice slaps himself in one scene, crying "old man!" in an impotent fury, the harsh, solitary truth of that moment rips through the movie's more cloying aspects (like Corinne Bailey Rae's cutesy jazzbo pop on the soundtrack). "Venus," bless its conflicted soul, gives a great actor the chance to rage against the dying of the spotlight.
The Oscar buzz surrounding Peter O'Toole is deafening. Despite having been nominated seven times, he has never won an Academy Award (unless you consider the honorary statue presented to him a few years ago). Roger Michell's Venus, which may be O'Toole's final major screen appearance, could provide him with one last shot. The film, which has generated some minor controversy, centers on the relationship between a 73-year old actor and a 20-year old would-be model. The 50 year gap makes this a March/December romance that would impress even Charlie Chaplin and Tony Randall. This is tricky territory for a film, but Michell navigates it with sensitivity and class. Venus is not crass or exploitative. It deals seriously with the possibility that an old man might fall in love with a young woman, and that (at least on some level) those emotions might be reciprocated. There's a lot more going on here than a dirty old man ogling an attractive young thing.
Maurice (O'Toole) is a respected but aging actor. He has prostate cancer and senses that the end is near. It doesn't worry him; in fact, he jokes about it with his good friend, Ian (Leslie Phillips), and his ex-wife (Vanessa Redgrave). Into his life comes Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), Ian's niece's daughter. She's a trash-talking, sulky young woman who has come to London to find work, preferably as a model. Intrigued by her, Maurice takes an interest. Initially, he is rebuffed, but the two eventually work through their differences to form a bond. He takes her shopping, to the theater, and to a museum. She takes him to a dance club. They fall in love, although not in the conventional way. Maurice is impotent; his sexual desire has dried up but he still appreciates the beauty of the female form. He wants to see Jessie naked and kiss her neck. She adores Maurice for his humor and intelligence, but isn't too keen about any skin-to-skin contact. Every once in a while, however, she allows him a liberty or two. She has limits, though: a hand on the breast gets him an elbow to the groin. Their relationship remains playful until Jessie's boyfriend enters the picture.
O'Toole deserves all the praise he has been getting for this part. Whether or not he will receive an Oscar nomination will likely depend on whether anyone sees the film. Maurice is a tough-talking, sharp witted old codger. He can recite Shakespeare one moment then launch into a profanity-laced tirade the next. When gazing at the Venus di Milo with Jessie, he remarks that the greatest expression of beauty for a man is the body of woman. She asks what the greatest beauty for woman is. He responds that it's her first child. This dumbfounds Jessie.
Jodie Whittaker, in her feature debut, falls into O'Toole shadow, but she has a strong enough presence not to get lost in it. She gives Jessie spunk and vigor, and helps us understand why Maurice falls in love. She's very good, but won't get the same accolades as her co-star, even though she takes her clothing off while O'Toole leaves his on. Supporting actors Leslie Phillips and Vanessa Redgrave are welcome additions. The verbal parrying between O'Toole and Phillips is one of Venus' undisputed highlights.
I was disappointed by the film's final 20 minutes - not so much by how Michell (Notting Hill) ultimately chooses to close the movie, but by the manner in which he goes about it. The climactic sequence feels forced; the emotions are real, but nothing else is. The boyfriend subplot is also contrived and unnecessary. Ultimately, it doesn't serve much purpose (at his age, Maurice is beyond jealousy) other than to add a few minutes to the running time.
In Hollywood, romance is almost always equated with sex, so it's often up to non-U.S. productions to remind us that there are other components to love. Like the platonic bond in Carrington, the interaction between the leads in Venus emphasizes that some of the deepest emotional relationships have limited (or non-existent) physical components. This is a brave movie because it addresses a subject Hollywood feels uncomfortable about, yet with O'Toole's authority informing his part, it's hard to believe that Venus won't find its audience.
Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi, the director and screenwriter of �Venus,� are both in their early 50s and, as far as I know, young in mind, body and spirit. Nonetheless in this film and their last collaboration, �The Mother,� they unblinkingly examine the effects of old age. Not coincidentally they provide their leading actors � Anne Reid in �The Mother,� Peter O�Toole in �Venus� � with rare opportunities to show how complicated, how impetuous, how alive older people can be.
Ms. Reid, playing a widow with time on her hands and sex on her mind, memorably pursued a steamy affair with Daniel Craig before he was James Bond. In Mr. O�Toole�s case matters are kept to a quiet simmer. He plays Maurice, an elderly actor � not much of a stretch for him, perhaps, but an unalloyed delight for the audience � who takes a partly avuncular, partly lecherous interest in the grandniece of one of his pals. Jesse, played by Jodie Whittaker, has come to London to care for her great-uncle Ian (Leslie Phillips) and also, she rather idly hopes, to break into modeling.
Her prospects do not look terribly promising in either field. Ian, who dreams of home-cooked meals and friendly companionship, is horrified by the rude, slovenly creature with whom he shares his dim, cozy apartment. Maurice, less timorous and more ironical than his friend, may feel the same way when he sees her lounging in her velour track suit, stuffing her face with junk food, but his approach is different. He sees her the way he sees everyone else: as a target for his charm, an audience to be seduced, a mirror for his egoism.
Their unlikely, uneven friendship provides the movie with a thin, wobbly dramatic peg, but it turns out to be just enough for Mr. O�Toole to show the younger guys out there � the Leos and the Brads and, for that matter, the Daniel Craigs � how the thing is done properly. A lean, stiffening frame, a voice roughened by decades of cigarettes and decent whiskey (or whatever kind is available), a slackening face and bright, twinkling eyes: such is the instrument he has to work with, and he tosses off a perfect sonata.
Mr. O�Toole�s effortless precision puts Ms. Whittaker, making her film debut, at a bit of a disadvantage, as does the script�s somewhat blurry conception of her character. The point may be that Jessie is unformed, especially in comparison with Maurice, who has had a lifetime to rehearse and refine the great role of himself. But some of her caprices seem to be less the result of her own volatile, unpredictable temperament than of the narrative requirement that she serve as a foil. Her mood swings are sometimes too neatly arrayed in counterpoint to Maurice�s emotions, as she answers his tenderness with cruelty and his vulnerability with warmth.
Since the movie is about desire � not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide � it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi�s knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination. Maurice�s attention to Jessie, which he describes as �kindness,� does not at first seem indecent or self-interested; he sees it not as an imposition but as a gift. He is, after all, a famous, distinguished fellow, and he brings an element of pedagogy � of Henry Higgins tutoring Eliza Doolittle � to his relations with this uncultured girl.
For her part Jessie, though she may be ignorant, is far from stupid, and she is quick to react to Maurice�s condescension, and also to perceive her own advantages. At times the contrasts between them are too obvious and emphatic, but the story�s schematic aspects are nicely undercut by the film�s quiet, appreciative attention to its setting. Mr. Kureishi and Mr. Michell both love London and know it well, and one of the best qualities of �Venus� is its lived-in feeling.
The filmmakers also make canny use of Mr. O�Toole�s celebrity, though Maurice is probably a few degrees less famous than the man who plays him. At St. Paul�s in Covent Garden (a k a the Actors� Church), Ian and Maurice pause to read the names of the real thespian dead, whose ranks they will soon join. Vanessa Redgrave appears in a few scenes (too few for my taste) as Maurice�s fond, resigned ex-wife.
As �Venus� moves casually along, a deep sadness starts to gather around its edges, casting a shadow over the mischievous good humor that is Maurice�s default mood. His mortality portends a larger loss, the eclipse of an approach to life and art that the great British actors of the mid-20th century, from Laurence Olivier to Michael Caine, embodied with such ease and charisma. It is not easy to define that special, paradoxical glamour Mr. O�Toole wears like a well-worn, perfectly tailored jacket � he is a self-made aristocrat, a genuine pretender, a selfless narcissist � but whatever it is, he still has it. Seeing a picture of the young Maurice � the young Peter O�Toole � in a newspaper, someone exclaims, �He were gorgeous.� Indeed he were, and so he is.
Two grumpy old luvvies, Maurice and Ian (Peter O'Toole and Leslie Phillips), share their time together between sparse employment, essentially waiting to die. When Ian's grand-neice (Whitakker) arrives to 'help in his doteage', he's mortified to find she's a lippy little chav. Maurice however, is quite taken with her, and so begins a strange pairing.
Peter O�Toole�s piercing blue eyes have lost none of their spark, but the whites around the iris are looking a little rheumy these days. The actor�s frail frame is a shadow of the dashing figure who rode across the desert in Lawrence Of Arabia. O�Toole is 74, and a bout of cancer plus years of heavy drinking have taken their toll. But unlike his hell-raising buddies Richard Burton and Richard Harris, O�Toole is still with us. Venus is certainly proof of that.
Whether or not this was the original intention, the entire film provides a platform for O�Toole to strut his stuff. In the early scenes, he and old-boy Leslie Phillips have a devilish time of it, swapping camp, barbed lines of dialogue and prescription pills with the same level of gusto. It�s a delight to watch them perform, but this is more than a luvvie-fest: both characters are defiantly holding off mortality with an arsenal of wit, bad behaviour and pissed-off bravado.
Such insubordination in the face of the Grim Reaper continues in hilarious scenes with Richard Griffiths, as this dying breed gather in a caf� to scan the newspaper obituaries and bitch about their departed colleagues. A more melancholy tone is introduced when the selfish side of Maurice�s charm reveals itself in conversations with his estranged wife, played sympathetically by Vanessa Redgrave. It�s only in later scenes with chav princess Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) that the film slips off track, particularly when her boyfriend (Bronson Webb) comes into the story as a disruptive plot device.
Director Roger Michell is adept at pulling great performances from his cast even when the surrounding film doesn�t quite match the actors� input. He and writer Hanif Kureishi first collaborated on TV series The Buddha Of Suburbia, but Venus is more of a companion piece to The Mother. This time, however, the sexual relationship that spans the generation gap is less physical, more lustful � in thought, not deed. O�Toole captures the duality of Maurice�s rapport with Jessie: part Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, part Humbert Humbert in Lolita. In return for sharing the artistic joys that have enriched his life, he wants to experience a final erotic frisson. There�s a beautiful, sad, elegiac note to O�Toole�s performance, as a cultured man enjoys earthly pleasures for the last time in his life.
A screen-acting showcase by a man whose best days, many thought, were behind him. There�s life in the old dog yet.
Three years ago, Peter O'Toole expressed dismay at receiving an honorary Oscar, saying he was "still in the game." The transporting performance he gives in "Venus" proves that he was not kidding.
Told with wit, genuine poignancy and all kinds of humor, "Venus" (opening Thursday) charts the unlikely relationship between a man in his 70s and a young woman more than half a century his junior. This is a relationship unlike any we've seen, and it's a measure of the film's subtle gifts that it is easier to watch it unfolding than to precisely define what we're seeing.
For though it looks to be about things fleeting and ephemeral, "Venus" touches, without forcing anything, on what matters most in life: love, friendship, connection. It's about aging and what keeps you alive, about the getting and passing on of the wisdom of a lifetime. And it is done with such surpassing skill on both sides of the camera that we can't help but marvel at it all.
It starts with the work of two of Britain's most adroit film professionals, screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and collaborator-director Roger Michell. Kureishi, whose credits include "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "My Son the Fanatic," has come up with a smartly written script that excels in character-based dialogue so tart it is as much fun to read on the page as it is to see performed. And director Michell � previously responsible for "Notting Hill" as well as "Persuasion," the best of the Jane Austen adaptations � knows how to produce exactly calibrated line readings that get all the juice out of deliciously offbeat lines like: "Oh, just kill them, kill the young, exterminate their disgusting happiness and hope."
The main attraction on screen, obviously, is the seven-time Oscar-nominated O'Toole, who at 74 uses a lifetime of talent, craft and simply living to turn the part of an aging actor who forms a connection with a young woman into a master class of lovely and seemingly effortless screen acting.
Equally impressive though easier to overlook is the work of Jodie Whittaker, who graduated from London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama just a year ago. She brings a deft ability to play all the at-times contradictory aspects of a constantly changing character that the film would be lost without.
It's O'Toole's character, Maurice Russell, a London-based actor who considers himself "a little" famous, we meet first, and it is something of a shock. Given our collective memory of the O'Toole of "Lawrence of Arabia," it is wrenching to see Maurice sitting on his bed, rumpled and fragile and without the will to get up until he slaps himself hard and says, "Come on, old man."
But though Maurice is having trouble with his prostate and is reduced to playing dead people on TV ("typecasting," jokes his ex-wife Valerie, an incandescent Vanessa Redgrave), he is still very much of a charmer, someone with a face that loves the limelight and eyes that retain a bright rakish light.
Maurice is in the habit of spending time with fellow codger Ian (Leslie Phillips), comparing pills and trading sharp cracks. Then his friend announces that his grandniece is coming to London from the north to help look after him. Or so he thinks.
For Jessie (Whittaker) turns out to be no one's idea of a caregiver, least of all her own. Surly, self-centered and willful, a prodigious drinker with a coarse tongue, she is the type that soon makes Ian "scream for euthanasia." However, Maurice, who considers himself "a scientist of the female heart," is intrigued.
It is a given that Maurice and Jessie, who he soon dubs "Venus," are going to get along better than either one of them anticipates, but almost nothing else about their relationship goes the way either they or audiences can anticipate.
For one thing, Maurice is too old to have anything more than what he calls "a theoretical interest" in the opposite sex, but that theoretical interest takes some potent turns. Also, neither one of this pair is a noticeably sweet person, and that shared prickliness and the bite of Kureishi's writing keep things from getting anywhere close to maudlin or sentimental.
Finally, it becomes evident that what motivates Maurice is not lechery but a kind of yearning envy of Jessie's youth and a longing for his own. Both Maurice and Jessie are, to borrow a phrase from the script, "in the habit of putting their own pleasure first," and to see them first clash and then go beyond their difficulties is, frankly, a marvel.
Not even O'Toole can salvage this script Two films this week are about dying gracefully: The Fountain from America, and Roger Michell's Venus, from Britain.
The latter is a May-December romance between a once randy, now impotent, elderly actor (Peter O'Toole), who has seen better decades, and a thick, uneducated, unattractive chav (gamely played by newcomer Jodie Whittaker) who keeps hitting him when he gets too frisky.
There's something sordid and pathetic about this, despite the best efforts of the actors, who try hard to find depth in Hanif Kureishi's screenplay.
O'Toole, though a mere stripling of 74, doesn't look a day under 300, and suffers badly from the fact that Kureishi, who's no stranger to leering male fantasies, makes his character utterly uninterested in improving his leading lady's mind, or even understanding it.
Kureishi seems so obsessed with avoiding sentimentality that he fails to make us care.
I didn't take the central relationship seriously for a moment, mainly because she has virtually no redeeming factors - she's Jade Goody minus the talent, looks and charisma - while he seems far less interested in her personality, her culture or her generation than in ogling and nuzzling her body.
The only times the movie comes alive are when the old boy's trading memories and insults with his best friend, another actor (Leslie Phillips), or reminiscing about his betrayals with his ex-wife (Vanessa Redgrave, in uncharacteristically sensitive, restrained mode).
It's a pity these latter scenes are so under-written, for the performances hint at depths of hurt and passion, regret and forgiveness, that don't exist in the rest of the film. Despite seven previous Academy Award nominations, Peter O'Toole's only Oscar has been an honorary one.
This is one of his lesser roles, in a piece that would be more appropriate to television than to cinema.
The narrative is far too unsurprising, mawkish and unconsciously sleazy to grip audiences in the cinema.
Sentimentality plays a huge role in reviewing movies and voting for the Oscars. Peter O�Toole must be hoping both will influence how people view his new movie Venus, which has him in the running for a Best Actor nomination at the Oscars, but I can�t figure out why (Personally, I think Sacha Baron Cohen will upset O�Toole and take the fifth nomination, but we�ll find out if I am right on January 23).
O�Toole stars as Maurice � a once great matinee idol and respected actor, who now takes whatever roles he can to help support his estranged wife, Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave). When not working, he spends the day hanging out with his best friend, Ian (Leslie Phillips), who, like Maurice, is going through the physical and emotional struggles of growing old. To help Ian, his niece has sent her daughter, Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), to serve as a nurse, but it becomes quite apparent early on that Jessie has been dumped on Ian because she is a troubled young gal. Soon, Maurice and Jessie start a very strange relationship that is part romantic, part father-daughter, and part weird (a very big part weird).
Venus wants to be Lost in Translation, but isn�t as compelling, tender, or emotional. Instead, it is about 10,000 times creepier. Director Roger Michell seems to be struggling to find a rhythm for Venus, and O�Toole and Whittaker rarely connect in a way that makes you think the two could have any feelings for each other. Quite to the contrary, writer Hanif Kureishi makes Maurice and Jessie overly boorish. Maurice revels in having a young lady around, paws at her, and always puts the kid in embarrassing situations, while Jessie is quick to accept Maurice�s financial gifts or use his lascivious interests to her advantage. Michell and Kureishi want us to like these two people, but it�s hard given what we see on the screen.
Worst of all, it�s darn near impossible to look at O�Toole and not feel some combination of pity and revulsion. He is one of the greatest actors of our time, yet, I will walk away from this movie wondering why it looks like he hired Sharon Stone�s botox guy, and Joan Rivers� plastic surgeon. It is difficult to look at his exaggerated expression and take him seriously as his face is pulled tighter than a drumhead, and he comes off looking ghastly instead of regal. While O�Toole finds a few moments to remind the audience he can command the screen, he spends most of the movie puttering around the set like a befuddled man, or reducing himself to the role of pervert.
Michell and Kureishi briefly explore the themes of growing older and facing mortality, but not in enough depth for it to matter. Venus is a shadow of what it could have been.
Grumpy old men Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau set the standard for geezer films 14 years ago.
Now Director Roger Michell brings us a successor: aging retired actors Maurice (Peter O'Toole) and Ian (Leslie Phillips), who share mornings in a coffee shop and conversation about aches, pills and Maurice's pending prostate surgery. They're a delight to watch, trading barbs, quips and observations about life and acting.
Then Ian's niece sends her uncontrollable daughter Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) as an unrequested live-in helper. The girl, taciturn, sullen and vaguely goth, announces that she wants to model (translation: she does not want to work). But she does like to drink, downing all of Ian's scotch, Drambuie and Stoli.
Why anyone would take an interest in this young woman mystifies me, but one-foot-in-the-grave Maurice still has a lust for lust, and Jessie is 19. He takes her to art galleries, gets her a job as a life model in an art class, shops with her, has a one-sided sexless romance. She takes him for what she can get.
Some will see this as a poignant portrait of age. It just depressed me, and the thought that the 74-year-old O'Toole, who should have won at least one of the seven Oscars for which he has been nominated over the years, may end his career with this role makes me sad.
Which is not to say that he's lost his acting chops. Au contraire, his scenes with Phillips and with Vanessa Redgrave (as ex-wife Valerie) are wonderful and well worth seeing. But this paint-by-numbers nonsense with Jessie is maudlin, overwrought and annoying, making it difficult to refrain from yelling at the screen or walking out. (Newcomer Whittaker is not to be faulted for this. She is excellent in her feature film debut.)
Faults notwithstanding, see "Venus" for the joy of watching O'Toole, Phillips and Redgrave on the screen together.
Venus won�t elicit many swoons, but if Roger Michell�s film never quite musters the energy to be more than a placid hybrid of Nobody�s Fool and Lolita, it nonetheless provides a satisfactory showcase for Peter O�Toole. In the familiar role of a once-famous actor prone to drink, the aged O�Toole proves he still knows how to wield that thundering, magisterial voice � regal yet playful, and always a surprise coming from such a slender, lithe figure � and though he�s unable to elevate corny moments such as a peeping-tom pratfall better suited for Ben Stiller, his quiet, mildly pathetic nobility lends weight to Hanif Kureishi�s lurching story. Uncomfortably vacillating between cute comedic bickering and hungry erotic longing, Venus traces Maurice�s (O�Toole) relationships with both best friend Ian (Leslie Phillips) � with whom he swaps medication, shares booze, and cuts toenails � and Ian�s niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the latter beginning as a Pygmalion affair but soon becoming something more overtly sexual. Any commentary on the evolving nature of desire, however, is somewhat stymied by the fact that Michell, because Kureishi�s script speeds past its creepily tender moments to make time for senior citizen humor, fails to fully explore his May-December romance�s physical aspect. It�s an inadequacy that leaves the film � aside from graceful moments steeped in regret and raw hurt shared between O�Toole and Vanessa Redgrave (as Maurice�s wife) � an awkward m�lange of scenes featuring its star staring lasciviously at his nubile object of affection, and then carrying on with his grumpy old pal as if they were a married couple.