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It’s stunning how unsuccessful “Water for Elephants” is, how wide the margins by which it misses nearly every target. Adapted by Richard LaGravenese from Sara Gruen’s swoony best-seller, it’s an old-time romantic drama devoid of any romance or dramatic conflict. The dust-and-glisten technical efforts of art director David Crank, costumer Jacqueline West and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto are about the only things that warrant the crowd’s applause. Handsomely hollow, this might just be the year’s prettiest piece of crap.
Its problems don’t even include the shameless regurgitation of the tired “Titanic” formula, with 90-something Jacob (Hal Holbrook) sharing his wistful memories of finding love and wonder amidst history-in-the-making. In flashback, we learn Jacob once looked like Robert Pattinson, and jumped a traveling-circus train after a family tragedy stripped him of his Ivy-League options. Joining Ringling rival The Benzini Brothers as a stable hand, then resident vet, the educated animal lover regards the big-top dreamscape as if gawking at a certain regal ship, and even straddles the line between steerage and first class.
Director Francis Lawrence hasn’t the slightest clue of how to handle the love affair between Pattinson’s Jacob and Reese Witherspoon’s Marlena, the show’s sparkling diamond and wife of its ticking-bomb ring leader, August (a typecast Christoph Waltz). The Reese-Robert chemistry is lacking to the extent that you might doze off in their sex scene, and Marlena is so dispassionate she’s practically a talking prop. You almost wish she’d stay with her loony hubby, a villain rendered impotent by the film’s insistence on sweeping up every little mess post-haste.
The proceedings are littered with sentimental traps, from Depression-era parallels to animal cruelty. Results-driven August pokes, overworks and underfeeds the circus’s four-legged, like Rosie, a 9,000-pound pachyderm. The violence never feels like anything less than a ploy, or an action swiftly frowned-upon as if to court PETA.
The one genuine article is a study of the wide-ranging fakery it takes to put on a big show. No wonder they got that right.
Water for Elephants
PG-13
One reel out of four
Now playing in area theaters
Recommended Rental
How I Ended This Summer
Not rated
Available Tuesday
A slow-burning survival story that picked up multiple honors at the 2010 Berlinale, Russia’s “How I Ended This Summer” pits two meteorologists against a bitter Arctic landscape and, ultimately, each other.
Laced with symbolism for the changing state of Russian culture, the gloomily intense drama explores the human capacity to overcome personal, environmental and psychological obstacles — a raw fight indeed. SPR
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