Earlier this year, Sara Gruen\'s bestselling novel Water for Elephants was tailored into a handsomely cut Hollywood movie whose brighter than life palette and sturdy storytelling reminded the New Yorker\'s David Denby of 1956 rather than 2011. Denby was making a wisecrack, but his observation was sound, and given the low standards of 2011, it could be reinterpreted as a compliment.
In his review, Denby overlooked one of the most striking anachronisms: Twilight\'s Robert Pattinson in brooding James Dean mode, warily guarding his sensitive soul under hooded eyes. He perfected his Method Act playing a sympathetic vampire; in Water for Elephants (out Nov. 1 on Blu-ray and DVD) he\'s cast as a veterinary student in the Great Depression, evicted from his home by heartless bankers and fallen in with a traveling circus train. He\'s befriended by the carnie folks (more Frank Capra than Tod Browing) and encounters one of literature\'s oldest stories—the temptation of another man\'s wife in the form of Reese Witherspoon (made to resemble one of those platinum Hollywood goddesses of an earlier epoch).
The other man is the film\'s scene-stealer, the circus owner, a maniacal tyrant endowed with pathos by Christoph Waltz. And yes, there is an elephant, a beast abused by Waltz and cared for by Pattinson. Water for Elephants gives a polished glow to the grit and roughness of the circus, a traveling show on a circuit outside of society, and captures moments of circus magic. An oddly compelling tale, lustrously filmed and costumed and elegantly paced, Water for Elephants is a good film for 2011 (and would have been a contender in 1956).
