You could write a long, long review of the film Venus – it’s so full of subtlety and craft. I didn’t realize how much I loved it until I got home and started telling my friends about it. The scenes kept rolling past me, scenes that were at once warm, tender, frail.

Yesterday, Peter O’Toole was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and undoubtedly he deserves it. Venus is his Being There – Peter Sellers’s masterpiece.

O’Toole manifests a human frailty so tangible you literally feel it. In this impeccable performance, he brings you to a place where you face your own humanity, your own mortality, your own alternate boredom with and love of life.

A refrain in the film is O’Toole’s late night reflections sitting on the edge of the bed. How many of us have sat alone in the wee morning hours overwhelmed, overcome with the solitude of life, the smallness and largeness of life? In the end, we come into this world alone and leave this world alone. He utters not one word of dialogue, but I heard every word he said.

In another noteworthy moment, O’Toole asks Venus/Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) to walk him to the water and help him take off his shoes. She resists telling him the water is cold. “I know," he smiles. “It’s always been too cold." The resonance in this line brings more chills than the cold water ever could. On one level, Maurice, O’Toole’s character, wants to feel anything, to experience everything. On another level, the coldness in the moment is unique to him. He’s the only one who knows how that water feels. And he laughs. On yet another level, the normal experience of cold equals pain equals bad is inverted to cold equals experience equals good. He feels something. Therefore, he is not yet dead. It also speaks to us of taking chances and living fully.

Vanessa Redgrave plays Maurice’s ex-wife Valerie. Their interchanges are so tender, so real, so emotionally mature. The utter civility, acceptance, and patience she extends to him as he comes to make amends for his inadequacies force us to review our own priorities and relationships.

And might I add, the scene with the toenail is to die for!

Although the dialogue is low, quick, British and therefore often difficult for American ears to hear and understand, the film remains a brilliant tour through the final days of a man’s life as he turns to face death. Look for it in the major markets through January.

January 2007

From guest contributor R. Lucci

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