Starring: Peter O'Toole, Jodie Whittaker
Parental warning: Coarse language, mature themes
At 74, Peter O'Toole still has the ability to shock, both with his looks -- slightly cadaverous now, the famous blue eyes rheumy, but with a strong chin and top notes of Henry Fonda in his expression -- and in the bravery of his panache. O'Toole is as much a maestro as an actor, conducting a silent orchestra playing the score of his insouciance.
Venus, a valedictory as much as a movie, is about a ladies' man mounting one final pursuit of a young woman, a charge fuelled by impotence and charm.
It's a story about how you're never too old to make a fool of yourself, or to set off in high-handed pursuit of an Academy Award.
O'Toole is cast as Maurice, an old stage actor whose looks and career have both gone slightly to seed. He's now cast mostly as corpses -- "typecast again," says his estranged wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave with a similar air of easy decrepitude -- and spends his days with his best friend Ian (Leslie Phillips).
Together they indulge in cheerfully obscene irony and comparison of their medicines ("You should try these," Ian says, sorting his pills on a restaurant table. "You'll never wake up.")
Things change when Ian has a visitor: Jessie (newcomer Jodie Whittaker, who affects both a nasal north country accent and a kind of nasal north country prettiness, although in some lights she looks rather alarmingly like a more attractive Ringo Starr.
) She's his grand-niece, and he has fantasies of enjoying a nurse-cum-cook in his old man's apartment, someone to cook fish and tend to his toenails.
But Jessie turns out to be a self-indulgent teenager who drives poor Ian to thoughts of euthanasia on the first day. For Maurice, however, she awakens memories: none that we see, but many that we have seen, knowing something about the career and self-indulgences of the actor himself through the years.
Director Roger Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, who examined similar territory in The Mother, about an older woman falling for a younger man, cleverly use O'Toole's persona as almost another character, not that the actor needs any help to haul himself into this impersonation of dissolute, desperate self-absorption.
Venus is thus a sort of Pygmalion story about the aging roue finding himself with a chance to get close to a final young woman, albeit one who will allow him only to sniff her neck or kiss her shoulders three times, and none of that goobery old-man saliva either, thank you very much. In return, he buys her things and tries to educate her in the ways of his world: He takes her off to a play with, "It won't be as good as Celebrity Love Island, but it'll be live.
"
This kind of thing could be creepy or pitiful, but Venus manages to present it with a measure of dignity. Most of this is due to O'Toole's brave performance as a man with all of the problems of the elderly, including a bad prostate and a lurching walk that makes him look as if he's bucking a cold wind, who moreover does not worry about the assaults to his dignity in his pursuit of one more sniff of a young neck.
It results in some moments of beauty: a scene lit to highlight Jessie as if she was a portrait by an Old Master as Maurice asks if he can touch her hand, or another when she is in the bath while he recites a Shakespearean sonnet comparing her to a summer's day, sitting on a chair outside the door.
It also lends itself to some crudities, whose shock value, including several uses of the c-word, deflate any danger of sentimentality.
It also represents O'Toole's final opportunity for a competitive Oscar (he got an honorary one in 2003). In its themes and bittersweet mood, it's almost set up for a lifetime achievement award, a tribute to a charmer who has wooed us for five decades -- through Lawrence of Arabia and Becket and A Lion in Winter and My Favorite Year and more -- and is still nimble enough to win us.
He's never been so transparently deserving of one more opportunity to kiss a lovely lady's shoulder.
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