Crazy, Old Man
Venus is a Predictable Last Hurrah for Peter O'Toole

By Hunter Stephenson

Venus slogs along on screen like a moving-picture obit for the frail British actor Peter O’Toole. It quickly settles on a skeleton plot of Lolita-lite filmed by director Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Changing Lanes) in an intimate manner nearing cinéma vérité; though this is due more to the winter age of its headlining actor than style choice. If you feel like an ill-equipped paramedic as much as a slightly bored audience member, don’t be surprised. It seems as if more and more actors and filmmakers aspire to put out quasi-last-hurrah pictures and it’s an interesting – with all due respect – niche for cinema. Unfortunately, Venus proves slight and predictable in its summation of life and death in a way that A Prairie Home Companion, Clint Eastwood’s World War II bookends or even the similar, funnier, more low-brow domestic Grumpy Old Men series were not. Next up, Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s follow-up to The Sting.

Starring as an accomplished, still-working theatre actor who has spent a lifetime devoted to pleasure and the arts, with a fair share of womanizing on the side, O’Toole lends his character Maurice a semi-autobiographical gravity and gravitas that shine through a pharmaceutical blur of pills (he trades up with his actor buddy Ian in a scene that conjures the Fat Boys’ Disorderlies, if obviously in spirit alone), fag puffing and whiskey swilling, on-the-chin prostate exams and exposed, dripping catheters. When he encounters his friend’s niece, Jessie (also the title character), a barely-legal cute, snarky, naïve wannabe-wannabe model with a curious void to fill, the film becomes an optimistic The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a lesser Harold and Maude focusing on the latter character, with a dash of Charles Bukowski, such as when the niece sticks her fingers into her cunt and offers their whiff to Maurice, who makes a hungry, failed lurch to lick them.

The problem with this relationship is that nothing memorable arrives from it for the filmgoer. Perhaps this is a shot at realism: the true meanings of relationships throughout a life are usually left unrequited due to dignity, depression and confusion, especially ones as creepy-awkward-rare as this one. The fact that Jessie ultimately quickens Maurice’s demise through psychical and emotional abuse before making amends brings with it a harsh residue that is left ambiguous in its message. Maurice is using her for her body, youth and an unlikely final taste of cunt, and she’s using him for his money and Topshop stops, access to celebrity and out of desperation, boredom and stupidity.

If you’re going to be a dirty, old man, you can’t hold back. O’Toole plays it safe here and allows the reservation to eat at his character and define him as decent and conflicted until the end. As the mortality in O’Toole’s eyes peers out with cloudy sadness and his lines are occasionally said in pants of breath that border on poetry, Venus becomes not so much a film as a learned, charming set of motions for a distinguished actor, a stumbling waltz that exists mainly to gain laurels from his peers and a nomination from the Academy Awards. It’s more like life than art, but it doesn’t have the balls to say much about either.

This discourse of Venus is written by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.