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.Roger Michell’s slick but ordinary direction doesn’t realise all the bite and poetry that might have been extracted from Hanif Kureishi’s hymn to horny old codgers and broad-minded young slappers. Aging, once hugely successful but now almost obscure actor Maurice (Peter O’Toole) becomes infatuated with his friend Ian’s (Leslie Philips) decidedly unpolished niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker). On the run from a life in her home town replete with a dismissive mother and failed juvenile romances, and wanting to be a model, Jessie responds to Maurice’s gentlemanly but assertive come-ons with prickly intrigue, mostly because he’s the first person to give her an ounce of respect. They fall into a give-and-take of challenges and favours. Maurice is no aged angel, having once abandoned the family he had with Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave), but now he’s quietly snatching at the remnants of his mortal attachments with both withered hands.
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.O’Toole’s terrific performance and Whittaker’s intriguing turn as a woman who grows up in the course of the film, offer guts and emotional commitment, and Kureishi’s script assails with some insight the culturally constructed definitions of and divisions between beauty and eroticism, how young and old conceive both, and also how art tackles, triumphs over, and fails to convey our nature.
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.O’Toole retains an astonishing amount of his trademark vigour, carefully channelled here into embodying a wise, romantic, but thoroughly unsentimental, delightfully gritty old salt, the sort of character Kureishi’s always been good at (recall Roshan Seth’s majestic turn in My Beautiful Laundrette). It’s fair enough when a waitress, glimpsing his ’60s self in a photo, exclaims “But he was beautiful!”, but O’Toole’s aggressive way with a one-liner, and white-hot glimpses of an ornery, horny, terrified character, show him at his best and most disciplined, and hang the wrinkles.
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.But Venus, taken as a complete film, makes me not so much sad that the grand old thesp tradition is wasting away, so much as the projects of fearless force they used to act in. Venus needed less montages set to mid-tempo soul ballads and “Oh, look the old guys are fighting!” comic relief, and more grit under its fingernails, to have been a truly worthy memorial.
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.Roger Michell’s slick but ordinary direction doesn’t realise all the bite and poetry that might have been extracted from Hanif Kureishi’s hymn to horny old codgers and broad-minded young slappers. Aging, once hugely successful but now almost obscure actor Maurice (Peter O’Toole) becomes infatuated with his friend Ian’s (Leslie Philips) decidedly unpolished niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker). On the run from a life in her home town replete with a dismissive mother and failed juvenile romances, and wanting to be a model, Jessie responds to Maurice’s gentlemanly but assertive come-ons with prickly intrigue, mostly because he’s the first person to give her an ounce of respect. They fall into a give-and-take of challenges and favours. Maurice is no aged angel, having once abandoned the family he had with Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave), but now he’s quietly snatching at the remnants of his mortal attachments with both withered hands..
.O’Toole’s terrific performance and Whittaker’s intriguing turn as a woman who grows up in the course of the film, offer guts and emotional commitment, and Kureishi’s script assails with some insight the culturally constructed definitions of and divisions between beauty and eroticism, how young and old conceive both, and also how art tackles, triumphs over, and fails to convey our nature..
.O’Toole retains an astonishing amount of his trademark vigour, carefully channelled here into embodying a wise, romantic, but thoroughly unsentimental, delightfully gritty old salt, the sort of character Kureishi’s always been good at (recall Roshan Seth’s majestic turn in My Beautiful Laundrette). It’s fair enough when a waitress, glimpsing his ’60s self in a photo, exclaims “But he was beautiful!”, but O’Toole’s aggressive way with a one-liner, and white-hot glimpses of an ornery, horny, terrified character, show him at his best and most disciplined, and hang the wrinkles..
.But Venus, taken as a complete film, makes me not so much sad that the grand old thesp tradition is wasting away, so much as the projects of fearless force they used to act in. Venus needed less montages set to mid-tempo soul ballads and “Oh, look the old guys are fighting!” comic relief, and more grit under its fingernails, to have been a truly worthy memorial..
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