Desiring Women.(Elegy)(Towelhead)(Movie review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

From Elegy' s Penelope Cruz to newcomer Summer Bishil in Towelhead, this month's heroines aren't afraid to love. John Powers reviews.

Beautiful women are invisible," declares an aging poet in Elegy, a clear-eyed adaptation of Philip Roth's novella The Dying Animal. "We're so dazzled by the outside that we never make it to the inside." His words are cruelly true of David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), a rakishly bearded New York culture critic who, deep into his 60s, is addicted to seducing his prettiest young students. Then he meets Consuela (Penelope Cruz), a ravishing Cuban-American with a moral sense so keen she even dresses in black and white. Kepesh tries to treat her as just another conquest--he waxes rhapsodic about her body--but Consuela gets under his skin, unleashing the terror that she'll eventually want to escape a lover 30 years her senior.

While Roth is arguably America's most acclaimed working novelist, film versions of his work have been depressingly lame. Remember The Human Stain ? Not so Elegy, whose director, the Spaniard Isabel Coixet, reveals what's shallow in Kepesh's vision of Consuela as a beautiful "work of art." Although Coixet can't match Roth's ferocious genius as a ...