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Apotheosis, now!

Peter O'Toole's swan song is drowned in clichés
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 8th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The last waltz. Leslie Phillips and Peter O'Toole in one of a few redeeming scenes.
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Venus

Directed by Roger Michell
With Peter O'Toole, Leslie Phillips, Jodie Whittaker, Richard Griffiths and Vanessa Redgrave

The saddest aspect of Venus is that it is obviously supposed to serve as Peter O’Toole’s swan song, and it is wholly inadequate for the task. That the summation of a brilliant career should be lodged within a flimsy script that is part Pygmalion and part Grumpy Old Men is a great pity. O’Toole has his moments, and his role as an aged actor going chip by slip affords him a showcase for both his infirmities and his nonchalant grit. Yet the film as a whole comes in its own patina of osteoporosis.
O’Toole plays Maurice, a well-known actor who finds himself somewhere between death and transfiguration. His best friend Ian (the wonderful Leslie Phillips) is another decrepit luvvie with whom Maurice spends the greater part of his days. They sit in their local caff reminiscing, moaning and swapping prescription pills like sweets.
In short, they are what Steven Berkoff calls “bored wrecks of civilization.” Their moment has passed, and so they sit in various degrees of collapse waiting for their final curtain, when not poring over The Stage’s obituaries to learn who’s beaten them to it.
Into their quiet last days comes a great-niece of Ian’s, Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), who’s to look after her elderly relative. She’s a Yorkshire lass who seems never to have been introduced to civilization: sullen, lazy and slightly delusional, thinking herself model material while she sits transfixed in front of the television, eating packet soups and crisps. “It’s been 24 hours, and I’m screaming for euthanasia,” Ian reports to Maurice with one of the film’s better lines. But Maurice thinks he sees something in the girl.
What this quality may be is beyond the comprehension of the audience, as Jessie is as dull-witted as Whittaker is dull playing her. Our final rationale must be that Maurice is old, and so any female flesh within his vicinity is better than none. His libido, after all, is the only part of him that hasn’t atrophied.
Maurice begins dragging Jessie off to the theater and to the National Gallery in some attempt to play Pygmalion to her, though she stubbornly lacks the native wit and will of Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle (or even Willy Russell’s Rita). Still, Maurice believes himself capable of educating her beyond her intelligence, and good luck to him.
Were Jessie a more companionable character, Venus might have been salvageable, though it would still have to overcome Hanif Kureishi’s lazy script. Every imaginable cliché in bowing-off-the-stage-of-life is reheated for us tepidly. In one inspired moment, Kureishi and director Roger Michell actually have O’Toole recite Hamlet’s soliloquy on the stage of a rundown amphitheater. Staggering originality.
The banter between the old dears has a certain theatrically camp flare, though most of it harkens back to better work. “I cried like Antigone,” Ian announces melodramatically to Maurice. A humorous line, though it’s simply a riff on “You were weeping like Niobe,” which the character of Norman says to Sir in Ronald Harwood’s superior The Dresser (via Chaucer).
O’Toole invests Maurice with his own piercing wit and nimble oration, while bravely welcoming us to observe the ravaged beauty of his face. Phillips, a staple of the old Carry On films, has carried his faultless comic timing along with him into his 80s, and his Ian is, even at his most cantankerous, a lovable creature. There are also brief appearances by Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Griffiths that remind one of what this film-as-valediction might have been in surer hands and with a better lead actress.
The one scene worth savoring has other Pygmalion associations. After drinks at the Garrick Club, Maurice and Ian shamble across the way to St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, the “Actor’s Church” (where Henry Higgins first meets Eliza). Inside, the old troupers take in the memorials to their fallen comrades-in-arms: Robert Shaw, Laurence Harvey, Richard Beckinsale.
Behind them a string quartet is rehearsing, and, in this shrine to great British actors, these two relics of a fading age rage against time’s cruelties, and begin waltzing together down the church’s aisle. It’s a stunning moment. But it is an apotheosis trapped in a tired and trite programmer.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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