Venus
I’ve restricted my movie posts to movies I’ve seen in a theater up to this point, but because I haven’t been getting to the theater often lately and because this particular DVD is an advance “screener” for members of the Screen Actors Guild (membership has its privileges) and because I liked it, here it is.
Peter O’Toole earned his eighth Oscar nomination for his portrayal of senior actor Maurice Russell who gets a final whiff of youth through the daughter of his best friend’s niece in Venus. When Ian finds Jessie, whom he was expecting to cook and clean and generally tend to him, to be an unbearably loud and rude presence in his London flat, Maurice is delighted to take her off his hands. Jessie, thrust into the situation by an uncaring mother in the country and adrift in London, welcomes Maurice’s attention, if for nothing more than the company and change of scenery, at first. But it quickly grows into a more complex and symbiotic relationship. Maurice is not shocked by Jessie’s youthful behavior that Ian found so vulgar. Maurice is kind to her and at the same time makes no secret about his fruitless sexual longing for her. Faced with prostate cancer and, worse, an “old man smell”, there is never any doubt that his desire will only be satisfied by the caresses and glimpses that Jessie carefully rations to him.
When Maurice finds her work as a nude model for painters, she is reluctant to show any skin as long as he is in the room for the simple reason that he wants to see her. At the same time, she appreciates his desire and admiration for her; for a girl whose mother wished she’d never been born, it may well be the first time she’s experienced the kind of praise Maurice bestows on her. It is certainly the first time she’s been made to feel beautiful by someone who knows he doesn’t have a chance in hell of getting into bed with her. And it is not just her youthful beauty and sexuality that Maurice is drawn to. His existence has shrunk from former moderately famous actor to an ever-shrinking circle of friends, clipping Ian’s toenails, and the occasional role as a dying man. Jessie is not just young, for Maurice she is youth.
While Maurice rediscovers youth, or perhaps recaptures a bit of it, through Jessie, she matures into an adult through her friendship with him. O’Toole came home empty-handed once again from the Academy Awards, but both he and Jodie Whittaker as Jessie create a believable and touching relationship between two characters who superficially have nothing in common.
March 23rd, 2007 at 4:54 am
This movie was wonderful. The metatext of the aging actor playing the aging actor, faced with death - mitigated by the fact that O’Toole is successful in ways Maruice only dreamed of - informs your viewing without detracting from it. And O’Toole can still dominate a film.