Venus Review
by Clint Morris
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All the planets may be aligned around Venus,
but there’s one star up here who you just don’t want to be seeing doing
it the ‘Milky Way’ with a youngin’ : Peter O’Toole. Hey!!? Come back!
Yep, the aged veteran of classic cinema rides into James Mason-ville to front this Lolita-esque
story of a legendary actor and his young – very young – caretaker who
smack bang into the middle of a May-November romance, and ignore the
sniggers and snares of the censorious and cautious.
Maurice and
Ian are old friends, and veteran actors, who never really cracked the
big one. Now in their twilight years, they continue to put food on the
table by way of their profession, but their lives have just got a
little too comfortable and well, a little boring. Enter, Jessie (Jodie
Whitaker), Ian’s plucky grand-niece. She quickly tries her
great-uncle's patience; but Maurice is taken with the girl, and
proceeds to show her the cultural sights of the capital. One thing
leads to another and wham… we’ve got a newspaper headline in the making.
Now
while the chunks may be flying once O’Toole’s mutters, “Have you ever
made love”? to the young darling (I tell ya, my lunch almost left the
building), I do have to admit, the storyline doesn’t drip with as much
as sleaze as it could’ve – and its partly due to O’Toole’s terrific
performance.
O’Toole plays the character with such wit, aptitude
and old-style charm that in some ways, you can kind of understand why a
young and impressionable woman might fall for him. He’s so extremely
likeable in the film that you’ll possibly overlook any injustices of
the script.
Possibly.
Director Roger Michell (Notting Hill)
seems unsure how to handle the balance between the romantic and comedic
stuff, with the film sometimes resembling a strange mish-mash of Grumpy Old Men and Nobody’s Fool by way of Lolita. And let’s admit it, whatever way you carve it it’s still hard to swallow O’Toole and Phillips sharing a sack.
Bananarama won’t be writing a song about this Venus, but the Academy might be writing its star on a ballot sheet come late January. 3 out
of 5 Venus
Australian
release: 22nd February,
2007
Cast: Peter O'Toole, Leslie Phillips, Jodie Whittaker, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Griffiths
Director: Roger Michell
Website: Click
here.
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