Water for Elephants (2011)
Directed by Francis Lawrence
In this captivating Depression-era melodrama, impetuous veterinary student Jacob Jankowski joins a celebrated circus as an animal caretaker but faces a wrenching dilemma when he's transfixed by angelic married performer Marlena.
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4 films that influenced Water for Elephants
What critics say influenced Water for Elephants
-- and then there's the somewhat seamier " Carny " ( Gary Busey and Robbie Robertson competing for the affections of Jodie Foster , whazzup?) and of course " Freaks ," which isn't really a circus movie for people who actually like circuses, if you catch my drift ... I'm sorry, where were we?
Charlie Chaplin's The Circus and Tod Browning's Freaks hailed from the period of Water for Elephants' main story.
The scenes recall "The Notebook," "Madison County" and a hundred other bars of soap.
As he recalls his youth, ardent movie watchers will draw comparisons to "The Notebook."
The movie begins like "Titanic" with an old man (Hal Holbrook from "Into the Wild" and currently appearing in NBC's "The Event") in a nursing home looking back to the year 1931 when America was in the middle of the Great Depression and alcohol was banned by prohibition.
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.
It builds a sense of wonder right from the beginning, with its old-man-with-a-story framing device – and it helps that the old man is played here by ageing veteran Hal Holbrook (Into the Wild).
If there is any weighty resonance rifled by the end, it is wholly due to Hal Holbrook (2007's " Into the Wild "), captivatingly poignant as the elderly Jacob in an otherwise contrived, murkily conceived present-day wraparound story.
I didn’t think he was much of an actor in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” and when he dived into the “Twilight” movies, he showed how awful he can actually be.