Venus

[Reza]

On fairly rare occasions the Academy has bestowed the lead acting Oscars to Brits.

1939
Robert Donat (Goodbye, Mr Chips)
Vivien Leigh (GWTW)

1964
Rex Harisson (My Fair Lady)
Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins)

1966
Paul Scofield (A Man for All Seasons)
La Liz - is she a Brit?/She is a Dame though (Virginia Woolf)

1989
Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot)
Jessica Tandy (Driving Miss Daisy)

It would now be great to see:

2006
Peter O'Toole (Venus)
Helen Mirren (The Queen

[Damien]

Jack Mathews in the NY Daily News gives Venus 3 1/2 stars

HEADING INTO THE SUNSET WITH A GLOWING 'VENUS'
by Jack Mathews

Venus. Comedy-drama about an old actor with a crush on a friend's 19-year-old grandniece. With Peter O’Toole, Jodie Whittaker. Director: Roger Michell (1:34). R: Language, ­nudity. At Lincoln Plaza, Cinema1.

Peter O'Toole, looking frail beyond his 74 years, gives what may be his farewell performance as a leading movie actor in Roger Michell's "Venus." It's one for the books - and maybe the Oscars, too.

O'Toole received his first Best Actor nomination for "Lawrence of Arabia" in 1963 and his seventh for "My Favorite Year" in 1983. He hasn't won, but it may be a case of eighth time lucky.

"Venus" is familiar territory for Michell and screenwriter Hanef Kureishi, who teamed up for 2003's "The Mother," in which a sexagenarian widow has a torrid affair with a handyman half her age. (It beats bingo, ladies - the handyman is new 007 Daniel Craig.)

The genders are switched in "Venus," the age gap has widened, and the affair here is one mostly of the heart. But O'Toole's Maurice, an elderly British actor, is as driven by his desire for romantic passion as Anne Reid's May in "The Mother."

The object of Maurice's affection is Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the 19-year-old grandniece of fellow geriatric thespian Ian (Leslie Phillips). Jessie is almost too rough to qualify as a diamond in the rough, but her youthful rebelliousness triggers a sexual response in Maurice that she quickly learns to exploit.

Left impotent by prostate surgery, Maurice can only look and hope to touch, and Jessie - who he nicknames Venus - doles out favors (a whiff of her neck one day, a kiss on her shoulder the next) like kibbles to a dog being taught to heel.

In fact, it is Jessie who's in training.

Maurice's fragile body may be further weakened by desire, but he remains the wizened, erudite elder, quoting verse, offering advice, elevating her self-worth without her even realizing it.

Things happen that radically alter their relationship and set us up for a very satisfying - if not exactly climactic - ending.

[Reza]

The Sunday Times October 22, 2006

'There's no one better for a dirty old man'


Peter O'Toole is picking up Oscar momentum as an ageing actor who has a relationship with a 21-year-old girl ? though he insists he has nothing in common with his character. JASPER REES meets the man who is still not at all unwell
Some 20 people in thick Puffa jackets and clumpy boots crouch behind a wooden sea wall on a shingle beach in Whitstable. Or Islington-on-Sea, to give it its modern name. The north coast of Kent glitters in the sun, but this is the coldest week of the winter. Across the Medway, you can see the contours of Essex in stark outline. The shelled-out husk of a matinee idol, silver mane flying wildly in the bitter wind, hobbles to his mark on the other side of the sea wall. He is on crutches after breaking a hip in a Christmas tumble. When the first assistant director calls Action! Peter O'Toole begins to play out his last scene on the last day of the shoot in probably the last leading role he will ever have.

You don't need to be a sentimentalist to note the significance of this moment. The film is called Venus, and it is about a beautiful actor growing undignifyingly old. In an idealised story of O'Toole's life, this would be the natural terminus to a career that began 44 years earlier with that prophetic credit, And introducing Peter O'Toole as TE Lawrence. He carried all before him in the 1960s. But he won the last of his seven Oscar nominations in 1982 for My Favorite Year, in which he played a washed-up swashbuckler who can't be trusted to turn up on set sober. His most successful role since, as the celebrated tippler in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, also played on the perception that he, too, is fond of a drink.
When O'Toole reprised the part at the Old Vic in 1999, it was his way of bidding farewell to the theatre and laying to rest the ghost of his infamous Macbeth on the same stage, which even he concedes was one of the great, great first-night disasters. Anything that can go wrong in that play will go wrong and did for us. There's a whole school of thought that I did it deliberately. But in Jeffrey Bernard, I was able, at the end of the 20th century, to do a formidable part that was full of energy, of diction, of movement, full of everything I used to be able to do. I don't want to shuffle on stage as a butler.

For O'Toole's admirers, their favourite year will always be 1962, when he embodied in Lawrence the fascinating ambiguities of a man terrified by his own moral passion. Who would have thought he could still hold together a movie in 2006? Only he himself. Three years ago, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose to confer on him an honorary Oscar, initially he turned it down. I'm still in the game, was his magnificent retort. After all those near misses, to pass up on the offer of a free statuette ? this showed the steely resolve of a high roller. His last truly great film performance was in The Last Emperor, in 1987. After that, there have been several emperors, plus kings, dukes, lords and knights. But his turn in the spotlight seemed to have been and gone. Troy was still to come, but, O'Toole ruefully admits, it was a rotten effort. Good script, he says, shaking his head. Badly made.

In the end, he went to the Oscars anyway. It was all right, he says. I enjoyed it, and my children were with me. The only thing that wasn't enjoyable was in the green room. I said, Can I have a drink? We have lemon juice, apple juice, still or sparkling. I said, No, I want a drink. No drink? I said, All right, I'm f***ing off. I'll be back. A man with earphones said, No! No! Eventually, this vodka was smuggled in. I had to turn it in for a while and cut down considerably. I still like a drink.

Then, last year, he was sent a script about an old actor who refuses to accept the dying of the light. It could have been written for him. In fact, it wasn't, although he was mentioned in dispatches early on by writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell. Their previous film, The Mother, portrayed an older woman's affair with a much younger man. Although a much warmer work, Venus is its photographic negative. It chronicles the curious, tender, almost wholly platonic romance between Maurice, a jobbing thespian who has been reduced to playing corpses in cheap television dramas, and Jessie, a 21-year-old northern girl (played by Jodie Whittaker), who has been sent to London to tend to her valetudinarian great uncle, Maurice's old acting mucker (Leslie Phillips). The uncle can't stand her, but Maurice is charmed by Jessie ? or Venus, as he calls her, after the Velazquez he takes her to see at the National Gallery. So he proceeds to charm her back.

I've not been in anything quite like this before, says O'Toole. As a study of humans cavorting with a finite limit, the script is superb. I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful if someone really had a go at it, because these anarchic, arbitrary sexual urges are disturbing things, and one copes with them. No one better for a dirty old man who falls for a sluttish young woman. Jodie, he adds, is a remarkable young girl. A remarkable young woman, I beg her pardon. She's a good actress, and she's game.

She needed to be. Maurice's sexual interest hits the barrier of Jessie's revulsion, but slowly, as the characters reveal their vulnerability to each other, she starts to reward him with tiny tokens of favour. She bares her breasts for him when he's ill in bed and, in a scene only Kureishi would dare write, she slips a finger between her legs and allows him to smell, although naturally he wants to taste, too. Oh boy, says O'Toole when reminded of it.

Venus is the antidote to all those market-driven Hollywood films that posit as entirely normal the idea of a pensioner copping off with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. It's inevitable some people aren't going to like the sheer honesty of it. The film, replies its 74-year-old star, is an examination of whatever statement anybody may make about that.

I meet O'Toole at a photoshoot. He and Whittaker, a no-nonsense Huddersfield girl (O'Toole grew up in Leeds) fresh out of drama college, are evidently close. After the shoot, they sit down for a quiet chat ? he on a chair, shee on his knee. I ask him if, in real life, he were to meet a 21-year-old... I've done that, he interrupts, and slips wistfully into Shakespeare. In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty, Youth's a stuff will not endure.

Of course, nobody knows this better. He and Richard Burton once went to see their 1964 film Becket, to watch ourselves 20 years after the event. Richard said, We want to watch the disintegration of our flesh.’ That's what you start doing if you start making movies in your twenties. Lawrence of Arabia, for example: I was 27, 28, when it began and 29, 30 when it finished. Two years is a long time. So I can see the decomposition of the flesh. You can't see it, but I can.

But Burton died before he could entirely wither. In Venus, Kureishi and Michell make capital from the collective memory of O'Toole's stolen beauty. My God, how handsome you were, says Vanessa Redgrave, playing his former wife, when one of Maurice's old films comes on the television. Coincidentally, How to Steal a Million was on soon after I met him, and even in a frothy romantic comedy, William Wyler knew exactly how to introduce his leading man: with a close-up of those preternaturally blue eyes. They are now the only remnant of the Adonis who freed Arabia, and their owner is inclined to make light of them.

An optical illusion, eyes. The sun is amazingly powerful, the pupils shrink to tiny little pinpoints, like a cat. And if you've got dark all round them, you've got these terrible old things glaring at you. They look as if they're doing deep and penetrating and mystical and strange thoughts, but, in fact, they're thinking about maybe a touch of claret about sevenish and a piece of haddock. I half-suspect him of choosing the rather garish sky-blue slacks he changes into after the photoshoot as a sort of visual pun on his famous peepers.

Unlike some actors, he seems quite happy to watch his old films. I invited myself along to a showing of Lawrence of Arabia at the Imperial War Museum less than a year ago. As for The Lion in Winter, he watches it from time to time. I saw it a few years back, but the print was off, so I left. He caught a bit of My Favorite Year on television a while back, and it's very good. Does it not feel like having his life flash in front of him? No, it doesn't work like that at all, he says. You learn very early, or you learn never, if you're an actor. You sit in front of that mirror at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in 1958 and learn that that is the meat. He pulls at his face. You can't be self-conscious about it. If you are, you're dead. The rest is self-consciousness and nightmare. I've watched actors I know ? who are not really actors, but they get awayy with it in the movies ? and they spend their life not being able to bear their profile, poor sods. It's the vain who get f***ed up. I've never thought about it.

O'Toole is not an easy man to talk to, at least about himself and his work. He is not prone to self-analysis and is resistant to the idea that he and Maurice have much in common. In what regard? We obviously do the same job. A refusal to grow old? I am old! I know my age, I know my limitations. He knew his age and his limitations. That's one of the reasons we like him. All right, then: the positive outlook, the sunny disposition? No, that's not me. I'm a ratty old bugger. He is mistrustful of the idea that Venus could in any way be seen as a landmark in his career. No, no, he says. It's another good job. Last year, I played a blinder on television in Casanova. And I do movies. That's not bad. He has since gone back to cameos, playing the king in a film called Stardust, directed by Matthew Vaughn. But the extraordinary daring of Venus feels like the perfect book end to his golden-haired desert warrior, right down to Maurice's quotation from Macbeth (Is this a dagger...).

His producer, Kevin Loader, draws me aside and says he's not sure if Peter understands that nowadays, winning an Oscar is like running for office. I pass this on to O'Toole. They always were! he says. Always. Don't forget, the best thing if you want to know who's going to win the Oscar is to ring the Las Vegas bookies, because there are 100 members of the Screen Actors Guild who back horses. It's what I've done since 1962. Did he ever put a bet on himself? Only once, because I was favourite, and I thought I might do it. I've always been an outsider.

[Sonic Youth]

Venus


By Michael Rechtshaffen
Hollywood Reporter


TORONTO -- Seventy-four-year-old Peter O'Toole could well earn himself an eighth Oscar nomination (which, not counting his 2003 honorary award, would be his first nom since 1982's "My Favorite Year") for his superbly rendered portrayal of a working English actor whose autumn years yield a surprise third act.

While the vehicle that will likely take him there -- Roger Michell's "Venus," in which O'Toole finds himself falling hard for his best friend's cheeky grand-niece -- hits a few bumpy patches after a very promising start, it hands the accomplished actor one of his best roles in years, and he masterfully runs with it.

That performance alone should ensure the Miramax release brings in the audience that responded to the Weinstein Co.'s "Mrs. Henderson Presents," which bowed at Toronto last year.

Something of a flipside to "The Mother," the previous collaboration between Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi about an older widow who has an affair with her daughter's lover, this early-May, late-December romance springs out of a wonderfully wry foundation.


O'Toole is Maurice Russell, an actor whose phone continues to ring, but these days the jobs being offered tend to be playing dying hospital patients.

Whiling away his growing free time in a cafe along with his longtime actor friend, the certified drama queen Ian (Leslie Phillips), the ailing Maurice is content to play things out to the final curtain.

Enter Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the typical teenager whom Ian's niece has shipped off to her uncle's home.

Although Ian had envisioned someone who would draw warm baths and cook splendid dinners for him, the rather coarse Jessie proves clueless.

But she also happens to stir something long forgotten in Maurice's heart (not to mention other places), and the old man risks being played the fool in the name of infatuation.

Things inevitably turn darker, and the film loses its way somewhat while transitioning from all the early beautifully barbed banter to that later heavy dose of pathos.

Although Michell's steady direction and Kureishi's lyrical writing might have trouble maintaining the right tragicomic balance, it's certainly not a problem for O'Toole, whose expertly modulated performance is a thing to behold.

While casually commanding, it's also generous enough to allow a good deal of light to shine on the fine work of his fellow cast members Phillips and spirited newcomer Whittaker, as well as in tender scenes with Vanessa Redgrave who plays his long-estranged but still palsy wife.

Production values are comfortably inviting thanks to Haris Zambarloukos' warm cinematography and John Paul Kelly's lived-in production design. Neatly completing the mood is the selection of breezy soul-pop tunes furnished by acclaimed British songstress Corinne Bailey Rae.

[OscarGuy]

Van did have O'Toole on his list. I also have O'Toole on my list but not as a nominee (that will probably come after further reviews of Venus come out and later this month after Toronto)

[VanHelsing]

Too late, Mister Tee. I already have O'Toole in my predictions list FIRST. :p

[Mister Tee]

I was initially skeptical about this -- as someone said elsewhere, Peter O'Toole's being touted virtually every year -- but the pedigree of the writer and the quality of the reviews have me persuaded. The (noted by Penelope) relatively thin field of actors so far could make this an irresistible opportunity for voters. It's been a while since we had a l-o-n-g overdue winner, especially for a minor film, but Trip to Bountiful's do happen.


Venus

(U.K.)

A Miramax Films release (in U.S.) of a Miramax Films, FilmFour and the U.K. Film Council presentation of a Free Range Film. Produced by Kevin Loader. Executive producers, Tessa Ross, Scott Rudin, Miles Ketley, Charles Moore. Directed by Roger Michell. Screenplay, Hanif Kureishi.

Maurice - Peter O'Toole
Ian - Leslie Phillips
Jessie - Jodie Whittaker
Donald - Richard Griffiths
Valerie - Vanessa Redgrave

By TODD MCCARTHY

Peter O'Toole reigns once again onscreen in "Venus." Playing his first meaty leading film role in perhaps two decades, the still charismatic and silver-tongued star scores a bull's-eye here as an aged thespian who, despite failing health, can't resist playing out a final dalliance of a sort with a nubile young thing. Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout, this small-scaled, thoroughly British entertainment will appeal most to older viewers, but good reviews and word of mouth could push it to a wider audience.
This third collaboration between writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell, after "The Buddha of Suburbia" for TV and the 2003 feature "The Mother," takes a premise that could have been cutesy and/or unpleasant in other hands and raises it to a level that is at once respectably mature and cheekily irreverent. It's "The Sunshine Boys" with balls and prostate problems.

O'Toole plays Maurice, a rangy, still-working actor who is "a little bit" famous but would be mostly alone were it not for his easy-banter friendship with cranky old fellow trouper Ian (Leslie Phillips, little-known Stateside but in the U.K. a well-liked stage and TV figure who appeared in several "Carry On" pics). Maurice comes by Ian's modest flat for drinks and they natter on like a lively old couple, mostly about their health and the old days. The latter is a subject on which Maurice is merciless where Ian is concerned; when Ian allows that he's considering writing his memoirs, Maurice snaps, "That won't take long."

Just as Maurice's doctor informs him he may soon need prostate surgery, the old hound is introduced to Ian's 19-year-old grand-niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker). A common girl with a lower-class accent, Jessie has no particular distinction. But her physique and perhaps her mere proximity stimulate Maurice (there is more than a 50-year age difference), so he takes her out one night to the theater and, after she gets sloshed at a club, comforts her and gets her home. Promising to find her work, he gets her a gig modeling nude for an art class, where he unsuccessfully attempts to be an observer for the day.

So begins a relationship with a dynamic all its own. It's less a May-December romance than a April 1-December 31 dalliance, with Jessie occasionally offering a little something just to humor her ancient courtier and Maurice invariably trying to take advantage of any possibility to push it to the next level. She completely renounces him at one stage and allows a loutish b.f. to rough him up at another, but in the end is able to give him something he wants before the final curtain comes down.

Pic is hardly shy about advancing intimations of mortality, and mostly humorous ones at that. One wonderfully timed scene shows Maurice in a hospital surrounded by grieving family on what surely will be his death bed, only to pull the rug out from under the viewer with a knockout punchline. A gentler mood finds Maurice and Ian getting drunk at an empty old men's club, then making their way to a small church where numerous theatrical luminaries are buried.

More poignant still are Maurice's visits to his ex-wife and the mother of his three children, Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave). Despite the many years apart and Maurice's undoubted betrayals, the two still share a palpable and deep mutual understanding that makes clear how wonderful they must have been together for a while. So decrepitly dowdy -- and yet still attractive -- as to be unrecognizable at first, Redgrave is an utter marvel in her scenes, and beholding her and O'Toole together carries major reverberations from when they were among the most beautiful and prominent players on the English cinema scene more than 40 years ago. They're still stunning.

Phillips is delightfully grumpy as Maurice's increasingly complaining cohort, and Richard Griffiths provides nice contrast as the duo's occasional third wheel for gabfests. But it's O'Toole's picture from beginning to end. Pic wasn't specifically written for him but it might as well have been, as it provides so many grand opportunities that he is able to amplify with his talent for acerbic wit, lordly pronouncements, naughty impudence, rueful longing, couldn't-help-it regret and self-consciously theatrical nonsense, among other human conditions and postures.

Despite playing a trodder of the boards, O'Toole resists all temptation for flamboyance, coming away with a rounded, amusing, endearing and, given his lack of opportunities in recent years, unexpected triumph.

Whittaker's Jessie remains a sullen, inexpressive vessel for a good long while, which emphasizes the idea that Maurice is mostly seeing what he wants to see in her.

Shot on Super 16, pic is an economy job, looking little different productionwise from a TV film. But director Michell obviously knew what counted here; he's given the actors a modest frame and encouraged them to do the rest. They have.

[Sonic Youth]

Venus

Mike Goodridge in Los Angeles
Screendaily



Dir: Roger Michell. UK. 2006. 95mins.

The team behind The Mother – director Roger Michell, writer Hanif Kureishi and producer Kevin Loader – reunites for Venus, another portrait of an old character being revitalised by love for a younger. In this case, the relationship – between a septuagenarian and a teenager – is even more extreme than in The Mother, but Michell, who is fast emerging as one of British cinema’s most distinctive directors, never makes the romance feel awkward or uncomfortable. The film emerges triumphant as a profoundly moving meditation on what the young can learn from the old and vice versa.

It’s rare that a film about a man in the twilight of his life could hope for limited success at the box office, but Venus certainly has a chance, principally because of the achingly tender performance by Peter O’Toole in the lead role. The 74-year-old O’Toole is a class act by any standards and his work here can’t fail to draw attention from awards voters and audiences. He’s been nominated for seven best actor Oscars and was awarded an Honorary Oscar in 2003; he has a good shot at another nomination here. The film plays at Toronto and Telluride this month and is set for a US launch in time for Oscar consideration on Dec 15.

There is a salty humour in Venus which The Mother did not possess, and which also bodes well for bigger numbers than that film (just over $1m in the US, for example). It certainly starts cheerfully enough with Maurice (O’Toole) and Ian (Phillips), two seventysomething actor friends bickering affectionately with each other and cussing liberally as they follow a comfortable routine between their London apartments. They are occasionally joined in the coffee shop or pub by a third actor friend, Donald (Griffiths).

The fussy Ian is preparing for the arrival of Jessie, his niece’s teenage daughter, who is coming from the north of England to stay with him and, so he thinks, look after him. But when Jessie (Whittaker) arrives, she is his nightmare – a lazy, loutish, hard-drinking girl with a penchant for Pot Noodles and no intention of being his maid.

To help his frantic friend, Maurice decides to take Jessie under his wing and he starts showing her London. He takes her to a play, he takes her on a film set to watch him perform a small role, he takes her to see his favourite painting, Venus by Velazquez, at the National Gallery.

To his surprise, he becomes attached to the abrasive girl, whom he dubs Venus, drawn to her youthful pluck and inexperience. Quietly resigned to the fact that his own life is drawing to a close, he discovers that Jessie is awakening feelings of desire in him. For her part, Jessie becomes quickly attached to Maurice, confides in him and allows him to touch her and kiss her neck.

The film takes a bittersweet turn when Jessie starts seeing a thuggish young man, asking Maurice for money and abusing his trust. Maurice knows that his designs on her are futile, but she has given him a taste of youth and new experience which he cannot abandon.

Michell and Kureishi weave in other subtle subplots about the poignancy of unrequited love. Vanessa Redgrave plays Maurice’s ex-wife and mother of his three children whom he abandoned for a co-star, and there are hints that Ian too was in love with Maurice, but was never able to confront his homosexuality.If O’Toole is unsurprisingly majestic as the vulnerable Maurice, Whittaker is the revelation here as Jessie. The young newcomer matches O’Toole scene for scene and her transformation from introverted bore to self-confident young woman is seamless and convincing.

The film has a tendency to bleakness in its subject matter and visual style, so the addition of a sparkling song selection by English soul sensation Corinne Bailey Rae helps to inject a certain joie de vivre into the proceedings.