Life's but a poor player

. . . Aging thesp O’Toole shines in Venus

DYLAN FERGUSON STAFF

Peter O’Toole shambles around this movie with his eyes popping out of his wasted face, his mouth drawn into a desperate grimace. He tries to hold his features in a respectable shape, honed through years of practice. But the only person he even comes close to fooling is, sadly, himself. And he can’t even do that for very long.

This heart-wrenching, desperate portrayal of a man at the end of his line, unable to disguise the urgency for gratification that shakes his crumpled frame, all that truly remains of a oncecomplex persona, is the tragic beating heart of Venus, a new British film.

The Brits have the market cornered on “charm” cinema, but Venus thankfully does not restrict itself to that corner, but instead treats its characters fairly and realistically. Which is to say, with the subject matter involved: harshly and depressingly.

The incomparable Mr. O’Toole plays Maurice, an aging actor who spends his time hanging around with other aging actors (Leslie Philips, Richard Griffiths) as they chat, pop pills, and try to quietly enjoy the sunset of their existences. When Maurice’s best friend Ian has his great-niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) move in with him, Maurice finds himself drawn to the young girl, and begins to spend time with her and buy her things. Though he tries to maintain

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Venus
♥♥♥½out of 5

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the image that he wants to help this misdirected soul, Maurice’s actions are motivated by an uncontrollable, lecherous urge to see the shapely young girl naked.

And thus it becomes a relationship movie, though one that operates on very stark terms. Maurice and Jessie are never really able to partake in the more superfluous trappings of relationships because they do not, and cannot, disguise their true intentions for two opposing reasons. Jessie is too young, uncultured, and naive to hide the fact that she’s using Maurice. Maurice is too old and, though once very sophisticated, can no longer disguise his true desires, especially with his waning mental faculties and the great truth-maker Death staring him in the face.

I’m not sure I would have found the screenplay, by Hanif Kureishi, nearly as rich and moving as I did, were it not for O’Toole’s beautiful embodiment of the main character. There is indeed charm and humour in this movie, mostly provided by the absent-minded, occasionally theatrical conversations between the twilight thespians, but O’Toole’s character — a man of culture stripped down to the terrifying essentials of what it is to be a man — is what drives the film home.