Water For Elephants

Friday 13 May 2011 8:50AM (view full episode)

Sometimes, at the movies, a girl just wants a good old-fashioned romantic melodrama. Something starring an actress of the calibre of Miss Bette Davis, or Miss Joan Crawford. A story in which the wicked are punished, and the good live happily ever after.

The sort of film Hollywood used to make way back when Peyton Place was the last word in wickedness. Or maybe Liz Taylor, dishevelled in her petticoat, in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. They don't make films like that any more, in these languid, cynical days.

But for a while there, watching Water for Elephants, I thought my wish was granted. Because Robert Pattinson certainly is alluring, in a troubled but unflawed by anything, droopy sort of way. Reese Witherspoon can still put on the ritz, and looks good in a gaping kimona.

And Christopher Waltz. Wow. What a villain he makes. He has a sneer that could split a sub-atomic particle, and a snarl to match. He revs up energy every time he is on screen, like a three-dimensional Oil Can Harry. If he had a moustache, he would wax and twirl it.

The Depression era story of Water for Elephants, based on Sarah Gruen's bestseller, is trite enough. Jacob (Robert Pattinson) is a veterinary student just about to graduate, when he learns his parents have been killed in an accident. They've sunk everything they have to put him through college. Shocked, he walks away from it all to ride the rattler, and winds up in a circus, The Bernini Brothers, run by the mercurial, brutal August (Christopher Waltz).

It's a rough world where everyone hides from August's rages. He has muscle-men to do his bidding, and a fragile blond wife Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) who is also star of his top-billing equestrian act.

Jacob becomes the circus's unofficial vet, and inevitably he and Marlena bond over his efforts to spare the circus animals' pain and misery, putting them down where the boss would work them till they dropped.

Then Rose arrives. She's a circus-trained elephant who won't perform. Our Jacob, though, believes in gentleness, and discovers her secret.

The best circus melodramas end in mayhem. Leaping flames, wounded animals charging about, crowds fleeing in terror. Water for Elephants makes all the right moves, but somehow the meller doesn't completely mell. We don't quite smell the sawdust, or the fear.

It's all efficient enough. But where is the Lust, and where is the Passion? Where is the irony even? Where is Burt Lancaster when you need him, in white singlet and spangled tights? Where is Cornel Wilde? or Betty Hutton dangling from her trapeze? Where is the danger?

I had a nice enough time, I guess, but I always felt safe, when I should have been scared. Oh well, bring on the empty horses.


Julie Rigg