Water for Elephants suffers from many problems, but let’s start at the top with the film’s one highlight, Christoph Waltz, a man who appears to have arrived on set and read his lines while everyone else watched. No one else performed. It’s as if Mozart walked into the room and instead of disturbing the delicate genius at work everyone decided to tip-toe around and whisper so as not to be noticed. Well, fear not Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, you weren’t noticed unless it was merely as the innocent prey hiding from the monster in the shadows.
Unfortunately, what I describe could have been incredibly intense. Water for Elephants could have been filled with fear, shame, lust, gratification, excitement and spectacle if it had any guts to speak of. I just wonder what would have come of this Depression-era film had Waltz not been cast as August, the tyrannical leader of the Benzini Traveling Circus. He played it as if he had nothing to lose, that is except for all the respect he gained from his Oscar-winning turn in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, as he channels the villainous Hans Landa one more time in a performance you get the feeling he could have done in his sleep. Which is fine considering no one else bothered to wake up.
Set in the early ’30s and based on the best-selling novel by Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants follows the story of Jacob (Pattinson) after he recently lost his family in a car accident, dropped out of Cornell and decides to join the Benzini circus as the house vet. It’s here that he falls for Marlena (Witherspoon), the lovely performer and wife of the circus’s owner, August, who runs his cash-strapped circus with an iron fist. A love and respect for animals is then transparently wedged into the narrative, but the filmmakers’ weak attempts are lost in the inadequacy of the entire picture.
Beyond what you just read, nothing unexpected happens — unless you count buying an elephant unexpected. This is what makes Waltz’s performance so jarring. The film is so paint-by-numbers, his character, who is clearly psychotic, just doesn’t fit. He’s the square peg in a movie filled with round holes, which is the same comparison I made to a character in screenwriter Richard LaGravenese’s previous script for P.S. I Love You. Problem is, P.S. I Love You stunk all around whereas this one actually has an idea, but nothing happens inside these walls that makes you stand up and take notice except when Waltz commands your attention.
The film plays like an outline. Director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, Constantine) filmed all the necessary pieces to put together a story and then layered on James Newton Howard’s best imitation of Alexandre Desplat, but he forgot to add the parts that make a story worth telling. We bounce from one plot point to the next with little concern or interest in creating a bond between the audience and the characters on screen. The publicity photos tell just as much of the story as the film itself… Jacob and Marlena embrace. There’s an elephant. They fall in love. The end.
It’s the Depression. Jacob’s lost his parents. Marlena is pretty. August is a monster. These stereotypically weak starting points don’t define a well-rounded cast of characters, but they appear to have meant to. If you asked me what ignited the flame between Jacob and Marlena I couldn’t tell you. I don’t think Lawrence, LaGravanese, Pattinson or Witherspoon could tell you either. I’m sure the answer is somewhere in the pages of Gruen’s novel, but it didn’t make it on screen, which makes me wonder why Lawrence wanted to tell this story in the first place. He’s obviously found no connection to it.
Water for Elephants is a tired bore with one emphatically commanding performance. But even Waltz’s performance could be called into question as it mirrors almost everything he did in Inglourious Basterds. To that point I hope he has more than one gear, and I look forward to finding out if he does in Roman Polanski’s Carnage later this year, but as for this film, it’s just a small blip on the radar and one I’ve pretty much already forgotten.
