Robert Pattinson stands out in an otherwise bland adaptation of Sara Gruen's bestseller
Filmed in the flashback-nostalgic buttery glow that I associate with glutinous adaptations like Nick Cassavetes's The Notebook or Lasse Hallstr�m's The Cider House Rules, this romantic adventure is based on the 2006 bestseller by Sara Gruen. Robert Pattinson attempts to emerge from the twilight as a wholesome leading male: he is Jacob, a young guy studying to be a vet at Cornell University during the Great Depression, when he receives the shattering news that his parents have died in a car wreck, leaving him penniless and unable to continue with his studies. So he trudges off looking for work, leaps into a train boxcar and finds himself part of a rackety travelling circus. Instantly, he makes himself indispensable as an animal doctor and a miraculously intuitive trainer of the circus's expensive new elephant ? a big-yet-sensitive beast who symbolises the troupe's bruised and battered collective soul.
There's a formidable cast here, and on paper, the movie should have a fair bit going for it. Hal Holbrook (an Oscar nominee for his cameo in Into the Wild) plays the ageing Jacob narrating the action; Reese Witherspoon plays Marlena, the troupe's feisty star turn and Christoph Waltz is August, the circus's owner and the jealous husband of Marlena. He is simmeringly enraged at her obvious tendresse for pert young Jacob, and liable to take it out on that poor innocent elephant of theirs.
If only Waltz had been permitted to let rip with more real wickedness. Instead, the film always coyly insists on his character's semi-decent side ? essential to explain why our heroine Marlena has stayed with him ? and so Waltz winds up having to pull most punches.
Waltz's character August is in the habit of "redlighting" circus stagehands that he can't afford to pay, which means he actually throws them off the moving train. He is a psychopath, in fact. And yet the film itself can't quite bear to represent him in this light, insisting that his relevant character flaw is poisonous jealousy. Witherspoon, a fiery and intelligent performer in Walk the Line, and especially in her masterpiece Election, is here a little bland.
This movie has some theoretically spectacular moments, which somehow don't read on screen as spectacular or even all that exciting. When all the animals are released from their cages, creating violent and surreal mayhem as they rampage up into the audience areas and out into the streets, that should be sensational. Yet it feels as inert as a watercolour illustration in a yellowing old storybook. However, our very own RPatz doesn't do too badly. This film may provide a bridge to a career beyond vampirism.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/05/water-for-elephants-review
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