Movie Review: Venus

It’s the end of an old man’s life, but the human heartstrings hum with the very last and best of this life’s beauty, humor and meaning

Peter O’Toole plays a veteran actor who although famous, respected and well liked, knows his life is coming to an end. It is a courageous role, perhaps not so far from the truth, but moments of austerity are tempered by moments of exquisiteness, subtlety, wit and funniness. Above all, this is an intelligent and evocative flick.

If you are reluctant to see a film about an old timer, don’t be. O’ Toole, who 3 years ago received an honorary Oscar (basically a lifetime achievement award), famously declared that he wasn’t done; that he had a lot of acting left in him. Well, here is the proof of the pudding.

It is a powerful film simply because you really do believe the old man doesn’t have long to live. And there is entropy setting in. In an early scene he is sitting on a bed, alone, in the quiet of his room. Then one is startled by Maurice, this elegant old man violently slapping his own face and bellowing, growling to himself: “GET UP OLD MAN.”
Will we grow old with a similar resistance to our own slowing down; will we resist our own systematic decay and giving up with such passion and vigor?

While some elements will deplore the subject matter of this flick – a very old man becoming obsessed, even falling in love with a young woman more than half a century younger, who moves in with his sometimes crotchety best friend – more discerning movie goers will realize that a much deeper message is conveyed. Values such as friendship, consideration and appreciation of fellow human beings are portrayed in an unusual setting: the gray and drab of London.

This flick is an important lesson, even a reality check. After all, everyone will get old and lose their attractiveness, but is anyone ever too old to be attracted to youth and beauty? In a sense we see the tremendous courage of an old man, who woos the young girl somewhat tongue in cheek (by offering to pay for her dress in an exclusive store by proffering a clipping of his friend’s toenail). We’re amused at his attempts to make some extra money (both for himself and for her). The old man is sometimes helplessly charmed, other times pathetically manipulated. One of the funniest scenes is him falling off a bucket (rather than kicking it) and into a room filled with painters and easels.

The scene where the old man waits for her on the pier is particularly poignant; we have all done that. Waited desperately for someone, even long after it is obvious that they are not going to arrive.

One aspect that irked me a little was his calling his muse (played by Jodie Whittaker) Venus. But having ruminated on this for a while, it not seems that it would hardly have the same effect if he called her by some other name. Perhaps the adoption of the name, and her acceptance of it, could have been done better. It’s arguable, because somehow the clever script may have made us intentionally uncomfortable with such a quick deification of what at first appears to be an ordinary-on-the-surface, obnoxious, always hungry, pretty but cocky young lady. Thus it is with artful flourishes that we see her transform into Venus, not only outwardly in the final scene, but we’re privy to powerful inward changes that reach out and touch, in delicate strokes, the empty spaces in us that most films never probe.

It’s regrettable that some people have dubbed this an ‘art’ film. Possibly, some young parents might not like the idea (having not seen the film) of their young daughters hanging around with the stereotypical ‘dirty old man’. But every man is the old man (or will be some day), and every woman is the beautiful young girl (at some stage). Although Venus may seem somewhat sinister, it’s really about the metaphor that this young woman represents. After all, Ian (Leslie Phillips) the old man she looks after (and Maurice’s best friend) cannot stand her, and yet the other old man sees so much, everything in her, and is desperate just to be in her company. And it is interesting to see how she responds to someone so mature, whom she can talk to about important and unimportant things.

Loneliness is an almost certain fate for old people, even if they have their spouses with them. Venus represents youth at its most pristine, beauty as a fragile source of tremendous power, yet she is introduced with her rough-around-the-edges charm, in a world similar imperfect, but also wonderful. It is this world that the old man, Maurice, must leave behind. But flaws are also charming, especially once we see how much a thing, a person, that is loved and cared for, can transform itself from what it is not, and into what it truly is.

Inside all of us is a lover, an athlete, a dancer, a poet, a teacher, a romantic, a husband or a wife, a fighter, a friend, a victim, a worker, and then, also, a dreamer. The film seems to suggest that it is the dreams of love that we must pursue, and the dreams of life we must set out to live while we are alive and strong. When the long years of our lives have gone, will we have the vigor to confidently acknowledge the beauty we see, that tugs as powerfully and as painfully as it ever did, and will we still act on it knowing how little life left is left in our bodies?

It’s likely that many who see this film will find themselves grateful for the beauty and power of their own youth, and pausing the next time they kiss a loved one, or touch another’s hands, or walk barefoot into the cold foam of a beach.

Released by Miramax, directed by Roger Michell; written by Hanif Kureishi,

Cast:
Maurice - Peter O'Toole
Ian - Leslie Phillips
Valerie - Vanessa Redgrave
Donald - Richard Griffiths
Jessie - Jodie Whittaker
Jillian - Cathryn Bradshaw
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.
MPAA rating: R, for language, some sexual content and brief nudity

Movie review: 'Venus'
By Michael Wilmington
Tribune movie critic

O'Toole achieves poignancy not by groping for our heartstrings but by honestly revealing Maurice's weakness and lost stature, by showing the raging charmer beneath the aging flesh.

Maurice, by contrast, is stooped and delicate, with a sneaky, crumbling little smile. He looks weak, weary. But this is a performance. We have only to recall last year's "Lassie," where O'Toole was the more robust and commanding Duke of Rudling, to realize he's playing fragility rather than succumbing to it on screen.

Movie Review: Venus

By Kenneth Turan, Times Staff Writer

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.

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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.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com"Venus." MPAA rating: R, for language, some sexual content and brief nudity.

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.