Based on the best-selling novel by Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants is pretty much the perfect movie to take your mom to on a hot summer afternoon. It's also a good date movie. Pretty costumes, pretty lead actors, and a pretty, strictly PG-13 scene of forbidden love-making. Hooray!
Set in 1931, Water for Elephants is about a young man (Robert Pattinson, sweating but not sparkling) who finds his destiny on the rails, like so many other down and out men in Depression-era America. His character, Jacob Jankowski, is one exam shy of finishing veterinary school at Cornell when he gets the news that his parents died in a car accident. Heartbroken and just plain broke, Jacob (understandably) skips finals and hops the nearest train to wherever. It turns out that the train is actually a traveling circus--the Benzini Brothers--and that circus seriously needs a vet to care for its overworked animals. Jacob didn't go looking for destiny, but destiny found him anyway.
After Jacob gets the approval of the circus's unbalanced owner, August Rosenblum (played by Christoph Waltz...more on his performance later), he is accepted as vet to the animals and charged by August to train the new star attraction--Rosie, a 53 year old elephant that August bought from another circus gone belly-up. August's wife, Marlena (the gorgeous Reese Witherspoon), a stunt horse rider, will learn to ride Rosie. August hopes that this larger than life act will bring in revenue the circus desperately needs. So Jacob and Marlena must spend a lot of time together training Rosie. And this stirs up August's jealousy.
The main issue I had with Water for Elephants is that it never goes quite far enough. This film seems like it should be bursting with passion, emotion, desperation, and atmosphere. We have America in the middle of the Great Depression and Prohibition--a time that (presumably) had an air of "live for today" since you might not know where you'll be or how you'll feed yourself tomorrow. Especially when we're talking about rail riders and roustabouts, who really had nowhere to call home. We also have a forbidden love between a gentle man and a beautiful woman. We have a beautiful woman's manic-depressive and violent husband. We have the circus, for God's sake! Yet despite all the possibility, Water for Elephants seems too clean, too passionless, too inoffensive. And the ending, when it comes, happens too quickly and ties everything up in a neat little bow. It's a little disappointing...
...With the exception of Christoph Waltz. Waltz proved he could play a unique (and very fun) brand of villain in Inglourious Basterds as Hans Landa, the snakelike Nazi officer who passes you a glass of champagne with one hand and punches you in the gut with the other. His character August is similar--one moment August is generous, friendly, even sexy (it's easy to see why Marlena fell in love with him), but the next moment he is uncontrollable, sarcastic, and very dangerous. And he rules his circus with an iron fist. Unlike Landa, August does not rejoice in evil for evil's sake. He is clearly mentally unstable. In one devastating scene, he beats Rosie the elephant bloody after she fails to perform at a show. Afterwards, he sits in his room, sobbing that now Marlena will "leave him for sure". His need to control Marlena, whom he treats as a prize possession, emerges in destructive, counterproductive ways, and ultimately drives her away from him. Although I doubt this will go down in history as Waltz's greatest role (I'm excited to see which roles Waltz will take on in the future), he at least adds some color and danger to an otherwise safe film.
Witherspoon is pleasant enough, but this is a bit of a throwaway for her. She's been far better before, and this is definitely a cut-and-dried damsel in distress role which doesn't call for her to do much other than look pretty and frightened in turn. I'm glad Pattinson got sweaty, dirty, and bloody for this role. I'm honestly not sure whether or not the kid's a good actor. His reputation as Edward Cullen precedes him and clouds peoples' view of him. Hopefully now that the Twilight series is coming to an end, Pattinson will be able to take on more serious, adult roles and work on his acting chops.
On paper, Water for Elephants is a movie I would love: I love period films set in the 1920's and '30's, I love the old-timey circus, I love swing music and speakeasies and the idea of riding the rails to destiny. And though I enjoyed the film, I didn't swoon. If you want a period film about forbidden, backstage love, I'd recommend Tipping the Velvet, a British made-for-TV movie about two women who fall in love in the Victorian era circus/vaudeville scene. That film is truly sexy and also has heart. But don't watch it with Mom...3 out of 5 stars
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