David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley, left) finds his life thrown into disarray when his lover, Consuela (Penelope Cruz), refuses to play by his rules in the film Elegy. (Joe Lederer/Lakeshore Enertainment/Maximum Media)

David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is an aging academic whose values are moored somewhere in the ’60s. Elegy opens with Kepesh playing pundit on the Charlie Rose show, chatting with just a touch of self-conscious preening about puritans and hedonists (he’s a fan of the latter). Kepesh is hyper-aware of — and embittered by — his waning sexual currency: he’s valued for his brain but no longer for his crotch (he uses a different word). A proud survivor of the sexual revolution, he has spent decades luring co-eds into his Manhattan apartment with a framed letter from Kafka. (Playa got mad skills!) But now, with his chest hair graying (though Kingsley’s body, at 64, is freakishly fit), Kepesh wonders whether he will be forever shut out of “the carnal aspects of the human comedy.”

That lovely, precise line comes from Philip Roth, who wrote the novella The Dying Animal upon which Elegy is based. Screenwriter Nicholas Meyer also adapted another of Roth's May-December un-romances, The Human Stain, but that script felt less assured. Under the sombre, intimate direction of Isabel Coixet (My Life without Me), Elegy has a strict, economical focus that Stain lacked. While those loyal to the novel may find that Kepesh has been altered into something lacking in bile and devoid of depravity, Kingsley’s creation is fascinating unto itself. This Kepesh, a decade or so younger than Roth’s, has the hubris of an early baby boomer. For all his liberal posturing, he lets loose with Updike-ian emotional violence in bed: “When you make love to a woman, you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life.”

Kepesh’s one final go-round is with Consuelo, an upright Cuban-American student played by Penelope Cruz (undeniably beautiful but too old for the part). Consuelo takes her pursuer at face value when, at a party, he compares her to a Goya painting. Soon after, they are having an affair that, for Kepesh anyway, is half-fetish, half-tenderness. When he casts a wintry eye on her body, it is with the awe of a scholar beholding a rare text. “I worship them,” he says of her breasts, and Kingsley owns the difficult line, almost barking with sincerity. Consuelo’s motivations are less explored — she falls for him easily, sweetly — but this is a film about perception, and the perceptions (usually wrong) belong to Kepesh. So does the film.

The sex unleashes a primal recipe of jealousy and possessiveness in the old professor. But never does he use the word “love,” so settled is he in his life, so married to his theories of independence and autonomy. A wake of failed relationships follows Kepesh everywhere, and he hashes over his sexual predilections with his best friend, George, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet played by Dennis Hopper. Hopper is an excellent horndog genius – love those “Oh, man”s and that lunatic giggle – who is just beginning to question his own philanderer’s entitlement. George’s poetry is “unapologetically masculine,” as Kepesh says when he introduces him at a lecture. But almost comically (or is that tragically?), the two manly men know nothing about women. All that insight into human behaviour, and none into their own.

David Kepesh gets some advice about women from teaching buddy George O'Hearn (Dennis Hopper) in Elegy. (Joe Lederer/Lakeshore Enertainment/Maximum Media)

An intellectual struggle with the gulf between theory and self isn’t exactly uncharted territory in literature; in film, it’s Woody Allen’s favourite game. But the familiarity doesn’t matter when the subject is shaped in Kingsley’s hands. His Kepesh is wonderfully drawn: he’s hasn’t fallen prey to overplaying, which hampers many of his contemporaries as they struggle to be seen in increasingly small roles. There’s none of Dustin Hoffman’s winking irony or Al Pacino’s screeching bravado. Kingsley is all small moves; Kepesh’s blinding arrogance is in his carriage, his barrel chest, the proud jut of his chin.

The most wronged love of the professor’s life is his son, played with frothy, seething anger by Peter Sarsgaard. Here is the product of Kepesh’s me-first life choices: an abandoned boy who grew into a successful adult and still can’t get over it. Patricia Clarkson appears as a former student, 20 years into a booty-call-only relationship with Kepesh. Clarkson is extremely sexy and knows it, playing a businesswoman who speaks of her professional triumphs with a hollow voice; there’s loneliness in her sexual confidence. (She also has another atypically perfect older body; it would have been nice to see some physical reflection of the actual aging process in a movie about aging.) The pair dance around their isolation, sticking with the covenant that they only matter a little to one another, when both clearly require so much more.

Occasionally, Coixet succumbs too deeply to the pressure of the title — too much minor-key piano music — and doesn’t linger enough on the wit, not just in Roth but in Kingsley, too. It’s a striking performance from an actor who shares his character’s problem of often being pushed, as a result of age, to the corners; in Kingsley’s case, this means being stuck in supporting parts in minor films.

In Elegy, he owns the human comedy. When Kepesh’s best self is finally called upon in the face of tragedy, Kingsley looks perfectly terrified and bewildered: all that accrued knowledge and absolutely no wisdom.

Elegy opens in Toronto on Aug. 22 and Vancouver on Aug. 29.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.