"Water for Chocolate," an impressive look at how life used to be lived in Mexico, had appeared ten years earlier, so I guess it was time for "Water for Elephants," an evocative look at how life used to be lived in a 1930-era circus in rural America.
I can't imagine any other reason for giving this romantic drama the title it has except for the earlier success -- commercial and critical -- of the Mexican film, can you? Well, you say, there IS an elephant in the movie, and there IS water, and on one or two occasions they're brought together. Still, I can't help thinking that --
Enough of this alter-casting rhetoric. A young, awkward drop out from veterinary school, Robert Pattinson, lands a job with a strapped circus run by Christoph Waltz, who gives the best performance in the movie as the demon-haunted owner and ring master. Waltz has a wife, the petite and nicely assembled Reese Witherspoon, who rides animals. The circus has a miniature zoo with zebras, hyenas, and lions and tigers. The newly acquired elephant is named Rosie. So Waltz needs both the veterinarian manqué and the beautiful wife to maintain the acts.
The young Pattinson and the sexy Witherspoon are attracted to one another -- Pattinson by youthful ardor, Witherspoon by desperation. Man, Christoph Waltz is a tough man to deal with. He's jealous to the point of paranoia. He brutalizes the animals. He throws sick employees off the moving train, sometimes to their deaths, so he doesn't have to pay their fare. He drinks booze like it was going out of style. His charm is all on the surface. And yet Waltz pulls off the amazing feat of making us feel some sympathy for his character because of his torment.
It's leagues away from a Walt Disney animal movie, despite that title, which I can't shake from my preconscious, but there's not much that's truly original about it. Rosie the elephant, thank God, is given no human traits, the pathetic fallacy, until the very end, at which point the entire movie collapses along with the Big Tent.
Nicely photographed in shades of buff and tawn, but it would have been nice if more use had been made of locations. It's supposed to be the Great Depression and prohibition, but if we weren't told it was so, we'd have a bit of trouble finding it out. There's very little in the way of local color, and I've seen Roger Corman movies that paid more attention to period detail.
Yet, it's informative in its own way. There have been a lot of circus movies around over the years so we've come to know that they're pretty cohesive and establish firm social borders between themselves and outsiders. They even have their own lingo -- beyond "Hey, Rube!" -- which we hear little of, alas.
It's all told in flashback by Hal Holbrook as an old man applying for a job with a circus as a ticket taker, now that his love and his elephant are both dead. The musical score is fey and magical. Lifted from Elmer Bernstein's "To Kill A Mockingbird."
I can't imagine any other reason for giving this romantic drama the title it has except for the earlier success -- commercial and critical -- of the Mexican film, can you? Well, you say, there IS an elephant in the movie, and there IS water, and on one or two occasions they're brought together. Still, I can't help thinking that --
Enough of this alter-casting rhetoric. A young, awkward drop out from veterinary school, Robert Pattinson, lands a job with a strapped circus run by Christoph Waltz, who gives the best performance in the movie as the demon-haunted owner and ring master. Waltz has a wife, the petite and nicely assembled Reese Witherspoon, who rides animals. The circus has a miniature zoo with zebras, hyenas, and lions and tigers. The newly acquired elephant is named Rosie. So Waltz needs both the veterinarian manqué and the beautiful wife to maintain the acts.
The young Pattinson and the sexy Witherspoon are attracted to one another -- Pattinson by youthful ardor, Witherspoon by desperation. Man, Christoph Waltz is a tough man to deal with. He's jealous to the point of paranoia. He brutalizes the animals. He throws sick employees off the moving train, sometimes to their deaths, so he doesn't have to pay their fare. He drinks booze like it was going out of style. His charm is all on the surface. And yet Waltz pulls off the amazing feat of making us feel some sympathy for his character because of his torment.
It's leagues away from a Walt Disney animal movie, despite that title, which I can't shake from my preconscious, but there's not much that's truly original about it. Rosie the elephant, thank God, is given no human traits, the pathetic fallacy, until the very end, at which point the entire movie collapses along with the Big Tent.
Nicely photographed in shades of buff and tawn, but it would have been nice if more use had been made of locations. It's supposed to be the Great Depression and prohibition, but if we weren't told it was so, we'd have a bit of trouble finding it out. There's very little in the way of local color, and I've seen Roger Corman movies that paid more attention to period detail.
Yet, it's informative in its own way. There have been a lot of circus movies around over the years so we've come to know that they're pretty cohesive and establish firm social borders between themselves and outsiders. They even have their own lingo -- beyond "Hey, Rube!" -- which we hear little of, alas.
It's all told in flashback by Hal Holbrook as an old man applying for a job with a circus as a ticket taker, now that his love and his elephant are both dead. The musical score is fey and magical. Lifted from Elmer Bernstein's "To Kill A Mockingbird."