Film Review: Tensionless ‘Water For Elephants’ Fatally Mismatches Leads, Casts Spot-On Supporters

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CHICAGO – While Robert “Twilight” Pattinson has persuasively branched out beyond his typecasting of reanimated and preternatural corpses, his miscast union in the tensionless “Water for Elephants” with pin-up circus spectacle Reese Witherspoon works as well as an elephant trying to spoon a sworn-enemy lion.

HollywoodChicago.com Oscarman rating: 2.5/5.0
Rating: 2.5/5.0

Despite an uneven plot progression that theatrically only brings a comatose life to Sara Gruen’s 2006 best-selling historical novel, sadistic ringmaster Christoph Waltz (Oscar winner for Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”) and flashback story teller Hal Holbrook (Oscar nominated for Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”) are the film’s only redeeming salvations.

Waltz, who’s hopelessly haunting in 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds” as the film’s principal Nazi nemesis, resuscitates similar gestures and speech patterns. While he’s playing a very similar character within a completely different and convoluted traveling circus story, he’s the primary character who’s making interesting use of his supporting screen time. Casting and then dropping Sean Penn for a Waltz replacement is one of the few things this film got right.

StarRead Adam Fendelman’s full review of “Water for Elephants”.

While the film doesn’t delve into compelling book developments such as the revelation that Waltz’s character (August) is actually a paranoid schizophrenic, so does it only glance over the literary themes of a love triangle, trialing a man’s moral compass, circus life during the depression, mental illness, emotions versus clear-mindedness, self-worth and illusion versus reality.

Gruen’s decision to aptly name Jacob (played in the film by Pattinson) is drawn from the backbone of the story’s parallels to the biblical story of Jacob in the Book of Genesis.

“Water for Elephants” stars Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson, Christoph Waltz, Hal Holbrook, James Frain, Paul Schneider, Jim Norton, Mark Povinelli, Richard Brake, Stephen Taylor, Ken Foree, Scott MacDonald, Sam Anderson, John Aylward and Brad Greenquist from director Francis Lawrence and writer Richard LaGravenese based on the novel by Sara Gruen. The film, which is rated “PG-13” for moments of intense violence and sexual content, has a running time of 122 minutes. “Water for Elephants” opened everywhere on April 22, 2011.

StarContinue for Adam Fendelman’s full “Water for Elephants” review.

Reese Witherspoon (left) and Robert Pattinson in Water for Elephants
Reese Witherspoon (left) and Robert Pattinson in “Water for Elephants”.
Image credit: David James, 20th Century Fox

StarContinue for Adam Fendelman’s full “Water for Elephants” review.

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