by Christian De Matteo

And all this is the story of Maurice in Venus.  Here Mr. O’Toole seems to continue the saga of Alan Swann, My Favorite Year’s wonderful protagonist, in another character, another man, but also another actor lost in the world of acting.  Celebrity rags love to attack actors for their unstable nature, their seeming lack of humanity and real, or more than fleeting, emotion and passion.  But, as Maurice exemplifies through Mr. O’Toole, this is indeed the actors lot.  How many of us could so completely lose ourselves in role after role, crossing currents in time, culture, nationality and lifestyle so seamlessly without sacrificing just a little bit of who we really are, or, in Maurice’s case, never taking the time to find out.  To his best friend and fellow actor Ian (the excellent Leslie Phillips) Maurice says, “I’m about to die and I don’t know who I am.”

Terrifying and bewildering all at once.  How does one get so far into life and still not know the very basics of the vehicle they’ve been traveling in the whole time?

Having seen Venus, I can imagine no other actor through whom Maurice could have been portrayed, and what I’ve just written is but only one reason.

The end of the credits informs us that the film was partially funded by the UK Film Council Lottery, and so it must have been.  Venus, in the incarnation we watch here in our American Theaters, on screens whose biggest chances come from wonderful directors like Sam Mendes, Todd Field and P.T. Anderson, is a movie not even one of these excellent directors would have been allowed to make.  Venus demonstrates the very big differences in European and American attitudes to what makes something taboo, too much, or simply to disgusting to consider.

Note here that I am not a basher of American film.  I am proud of my country and the great artists it has created, cultivated and supported.  Thrilled for the Coppola’s and Scorcese’s, but still am aware that American studios have a list of certain chances they just won’t take.  (Take the controversy over the latest Dakota Fanning film, Hounddog.)  Venus is about a man near death, knarled and bent by age and sickness, impotent due to a sickly prostate who falls in love, as he’s known to do, with a much, much younger woman.

They flirt, they mingle, they even touch in ways well beyond grandfatherly pats and pinches.  He loves her, wants her and deeply desires her and makes it known.

I wish more people had been in the theater with me and my friend when we saw this, wish I could have gauged reactions to seeing an old man still being allowed to behave as a man, not as a eunuch, as we seem to prefer our elderly.  American film seems to have a fairy tale deal made with elderly characters, that they may be only cuddly, simple bastions of history and cookies, or hideous villains intent on ruining the lives of their offspring, evil step-moms and dads whose greatest gift to their family would be a sudden and much longed for death.

Peter O’Toole does not give us this in Maurice.  In a performance I must, but am loathe to, call brave due to society’s mores, he remains endearing throughout, not as a cute dodderer but as a man in every truth and temptation therein assumed with the title.  He does not attempt to sneak an innocent beck from his Venus, but rather to engulf her in the time-honored way of male love and lust. 

But no American studio would ever take the chances Venus takes in showing this to it’s ultimate and true reality.  Not now, anyway, as we are long from the days of Harold and Maude, and, if somehow now, never in wide release and certainly never celebrated.  (But a big thank you to Miramax for bringing Venus here, if not making these type movies themselves.)

To my mind, nominations being what they are, the best actor category belongs firmly to Forest Whitaker and Peter O’Toole, and beyond that I cannot decide.  Peter O’Toole is magnificent, as is every other actor and every other piece of this tremendous film.

I can’t recommend this enough, as surely one of the best movies of the 2006, and hope it will spark comment and debate, rather than swift dismissal and sophomoric jokes.  What does it mean to be a man and be dying, losing your ability to do what men do, and unsure not only of who you are but who you ever were?  Questions as inescapable in all their different forms as these are rarely so well dealt with and rarely with such aplomb.