Water for Elephants is one of those big, extravagant-looking romances that you might automatically deem "conventional" -- except for the fact that almost nobody makes big, extravagant-looking romances anymore. That's the elephant in the room that the movie's director, Francis Lawrence, faces head on. Whatever his movie's flaws may be, he's alive to the wonder of spectacle, and he still believes in the old-fashioned idea of movie stars: Those with two legs, and especially those with four.
Jacob (Robert Pattinson) is an aspiring veterinarian just finishing his degree at Cornell when his parents are killed in a car accident. His mind addled by grief, he ditches school and hops a train, one that, it turns out, carries a ragtag, two-bit traveling circus. It's 1931, and no one is making much of a living: The Benzini Brothers Circus makes its way by picking up performers, roustabouts and animals -- cheap -- from other circuses that have failed.
These circus people aren't a warm, cuddly bunch, and Jacob isn't immediately drawn into the fold: Someone hands him a shovel so he can help pitch manure out of the animals' cars; he's tossed into another car with an angry dwarf performer named Kinko (Mark Povinelli) as a roommate. But when the circus' manager, a cruel but complicated egomaniac named August (Christoph Waltz) learns that Jacob is a vet -- or almost a vet -- he finds other uses for him, which basically amount to protecting August's four-legged investments, which include horses, hyenas and assorted big cats.
Jacob's situation becomes precarious when he fails to save one of the show's star liberty horses. His predicament worsens when he falls in love with August's wife, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), a bareback performer -- she prances about bewitchingly in pink leotards and spangles, when she's not lounging languidly in liquid-satin gowns. It's love at first sight for Jacob, and maybe at second for Marlena, but their bond is strengthened further when August picks up an elephant from yet another failed circus. Her name is Rosie, and she is, they've been told, extremely stupid.
The fact that Jacob speaks her language, not just figuratively but literally, is one of the movie's loveliest touches, and it's taken not just from the novel on which the movie is based -- by Sara Gruen -- but from real life. (To tell you more would give too much away, but Gruen unearthed some interesting performing-elephant facts in the research of her book.) Gruen's novel is unpretentious and satisfying, and although screenwriter Richard LaGravenese has streamlined it considerably, he and Lawrence have preserved the book's spirit: This may be a love story, but it's also a snapshot of a lost era and a strange, exciting, rough way to make a living. Even the costumes and props all look a little faded and ragged around the edges: For all the movie's gloss and glamour, it also acknowledges some of the harsh realities of its setting.
Attempted with less skill and integrity, that delicate balancing act might have made Water for Elephants seem insincere: Is it historically responsible to make such a gorgeous-looking movie set amid hardscrabble working men and women during the Depression? But Lawrence and his cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, hit the unifying truth, as opposed to the contradiction, behind that idea. Water for Elephants is beautifully lit and shot, in a way that links old Hollywood with Hi-Def. Prieto is attuned to every small bit of loveliness in an unforgiving landscape. He picks up on the way sunlight sneaks in through the slatted walls of otherwise dim, drab boxcars; he sees how moonlight might find its twin glow in a white satin dress. At one point, as Jacob shovels that manure, the camera captures a tizzy of buzzing flies in a shaft of sunlight -- they're like tiny, grubby fairies -- but I don't think that shot is a joke or a bit of star-cinematographer excessiveness. Instead, it captures the urgency, the necessity, of finding beauty in unexpected corners. Even flies deserve their fleeting chance at being lit in the tradition of Hurrell.
The movie's actual stars deserve that too, and Prieto and Lawrence don't skimp on them. If anything, their visual approach serves as a kind of Spackle, filling in some of the cracks left by a few of the performers. OK, by one performer: Pattinson isn't a great actor; maybe we've seen enough of him to surmise that he may never even be a good one. But at least the camera loves him, even if it doesn't know quite what to do with him. Pattinson's detractors may write him off as just being pretty, but his features are too odd for mere prettiness: With his wide-set eyes and narrow slit of a smile, he's like an Amphibian god. He's good at radiating lovesickness -- he's had lots of practice in those Twilight movies -- but less believable when it comes to throwing off sparks of righteous rage or thwarted passion.
And he doesn't quite connect with Witherspoon, though that may not be wholly his fault. She can be a wonderful actress, but when it comes to sharing the screen with her, I suspect she's a tough nut to crack. In Water for Elephants, her hair is Harlow gold, but she doesn't have Bette Davis eyes: They're small and glittery to the point of being calculating, even hard. That look works well for the character, a former opportunist who suddenly wakes up to the possibility of love. But Witherspoon's Marlena doesn't melt easily, and when she does give in to romance, you can almost see her grudging reluctance in the set of her sharp little jaw.
Still, Witherspoon is something to watch, strutting her stuff in a selection of period-perfect outfits including daytime pajama-pants and silky, nighttime kimonos. (The costume designer is Jacqueline West.) More predictable, and a lot less fun, is Hal Holbrook, appearing in the story's unnecessary framing device as the aged Jacob: He acts grumpy at first and then twinkles madly, as if on cue. Waltz gives the movie's finest and subtlest human performance: His cruel, self-centered August is all the more terrifying for the way he lets the occasional flash of self-doubt break through. He's more unsettling in this role than he was in his breakthrough movie, Inglourious Basterds, which at least allowed him the safety valve of black humor.
As a director, Lawrence loves the big canvas -- he seems to thrive on having a wide-open expanse of screen to play with, and you see it in the movie's climax, a jumble-sale symphony of orchestrated chaos. Lawrence's last movie was the 2007 I Am Legend, a strange hybrid picture that was two-thirds haunting, one-third pack-'em-in crowd-pleaser. I've completely forgotten the throwaway, seemingly tacked-on ending of I Am Legend. But I'll never forget the movie's stirring depiction of a futuristic New York overrun not just with zombies but with all sorts of wildlife, including deer who restake their claim on the land with a clatter of hoofs.
I also can't forget Will Smith's -- and the movie's -- connection with the German shepherd who figures so prominently in the story. (In one sequence, Smith gives the dog a sudsy bath, singing a Bob Marley tune as he soaps her ears; temporarily safe from the horde of zombies raging outdoors, they're reclaiming a bit of civilization for themselves.) With Water for Elephants, Lawrence has moved on to much bigger beasts. His Rosie -- she's played by an elephant-actor named Tai -- is enigmatic, essentially unknowable. Lawrence and Prieto don't indulge in a lot of loving close-ups of her face. Rosie's beauty, and her star presence, is all in her girth: You've got to love all of her to love her at all.
And she isn't immediately beautiful, at least not in the strict sense of the word. Her skin is speckled and gray and crepey, as if she'd suddenly decided to sunbathe in the desert after soaking for days in a brine bath. But her lumbering gait is its own kind of ballet; her translucent ears are giant sunlight receptors. She's a big girl in a big movie, and fittingly, it's she who gives Pattinson his best moment: When August first acquires Rosie, and the doors of a big barnlike structure swing open to reveal her in all her wrinkled glory, Pattinson's Jacob takes one look at her and laughs -- from the inside, not just on the surface. Pattinson's shortcomings as an actor are many. But he knows what to do in the presence of a heffalump goddess.