Cultural critic David Kepesh finds his life -- which he indicates is a state of "emancipated manhood" -- thrown into tragic disarray by Consuela Castillo, a well-mannered student who awakens a sense of sexual possessiveness in her teacher.
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Philip Roth's novel "The Dying Animal" is the source material for this somber, occasionally dreary drama of sexual self-absorption from Spanish director Isabel Coixnet (My Life Without Me) and scriptwriter Nicholas Meyer. Ben Kingsley gives a mammoth performance as aging writer, Columbia lit professor and veteran NPR host, David Kepesh. Long-since divorced, and quite the satyr in bedding down his female students (although, he's careful to note, always after he's turned in their final grades), he advocates sexual freedom for its own sake; it's why he deserted his wife and son years ago, and maintains a once-monthly relationship with his longtime traveling businesswoman mistress (Patricia Clarkson). While bemoaning his advancing years ("In my head, nothing has changed"), David successfully courts and seduces poised, vibrant Cuban graduate student, Consuela (Penelope Cruz), thirty years his junior. Their one-night-stand upgrades into a full-scale affair, going far beyond the usual expiration date of his flings with his students. Obsessed with possessing Consuela, jealous of her life beyond himself, David is still unable to take the next step with her into a larger world of possibilities. The tragedy is that David is so alienated from himself and his feelings, he fails to recognize the first stirrings of that foreign emotion, love, or accept its responsibilities. But David loses our sympathy by reducing every aspect of life, including his own self-image, to its sexual components. His only concept of marriage is that, in the 1950s, you had to do it to get sex. He frets that Consuela never "yearns" for his equipment, and for someone supposedly so erudite and verbal, he clams up whenever she tries to evolve their relationship into something more meaningful than his adoration of her body. For a self-confessed champion of "sexual happiness," he's a pretty glum guy, and his whining just becomes irritating. Cruz brings warmth and humanity to a character who is basically every aging professor's wet dream, (at least Roth's), but her emotional investment in David is never quite credible; she certainly seems too sophisticated to need him to "give her some culture," as David explains it. At least there's Dennis Hopper as David's poet buddy to breathe some cheerful, no-nonsense sanity into David's morose self-regard. That Dennis Hopper provides the voice of reason may be the most eloquent point about aging that this movie makes.
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