A couple of old actors are sitting around in their local coffee shop, checking the obituaries to see if any of their contemporaries has died.
They find one and, looking at the picture, one of them mutters: “Look how beautiful he was.” That goes, too, for Peter O’Toole, who plays one of the old actors, Maurice. Except that O’Toole is still alive. Gazing at his face, which seems now to be suspended loosely from his cheekbones, one says to oneself, “Look how beautiful he was.”
It is not just the memory of the young O’Toole, when he was Lawrence of Arabia, or King Henry II, or the caddish charmer in What’s New Pussycat of whom Capucine croons: “When the light hits him a certain way, he’s almost handsome …” “Almost” because he was, in fact, not handsome but beautiful. And his face still carries, livingly, the memory of that beauty — a memory or echo which is itself a kind of beauty.
O’Toole is the perfect choice to play an old actor, as he did in My Favourite Year (1982), though that persona, Alan Swann, was more of a 1940s-style screen star (à la John Barrymore or Errol Flynn) than the faded thespian he plays in Venus. The Swann character was also an alcoholic, which drew on another piece of O’Toole typecasting, and potentially made it the perfect O’Toole role — an alcoholic actor.
He isn’t an alcoholic in Venus, but he’s the ideal actor to play an actor because O’Toole’s kind of acting has always had more in common with the larger-than-life style of Edmund Keane or David Garrick in the 19th century than with present-day manners. He has flamboyant gestures and a stage voice with, doubtless, a stage whisper that can be heard in the outer suburbs. (Perhaps the most apt contemporary comparison, in a way, is with Jack Nicholson. Both can make or break a movie on their own, depending on how their overthe-top style plays in the context.)
In Venus, though, O’Toole’s extravagance is held in check, and his Maurice is entirely believable. He’s still very much the actor, one whose grand gestures are part of his internalised stock-in-trade, but he’s also an ordinary man in the winter of his life, clinging to whatever grand gestures life has given him, eager for those it still has to give. The scenes of Maurice and his best friend, Ian, another old actor (played by Leslie Phillips), are hilarious and touching; crabby yet jokey, pathetic yet indomitable, they are tottering together towards their final curtain.
Then, into their lives comes a surprise. Ian’s disgraced grand-niece has been sent to stay with him in London, ostensibly to care for him, but clearly also to get this troublesome girl off the family’s hands. Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) is crass and sulky and Ian soon finds her an enormous pain in the ass. Maurice, however, was once a great charmer and seducer, and he sees something in Jessie that appeals to him, something he wants, but also perhaps something he can give her.
Scriptwriter Hanif Kureishi (and director Roger Michell) explored love and sex across a gulf of age in The Mother, so Venus makes a compelling companion piece to that powerful work. But it is very different in tone, less edgy, more elegiac and perhaps also more deeply ironic; its colours (narrative as well as visual) are the shades of grey that are also the colours of old Dowager Empress London, where the film is set. There’s none of the shock that attended The Mother (or Kureishi’s other recent film about relationships, the sexually explicit Intimacy).
Venus, instead, is gentle and underplayed — though it has its share of emotional tension. It works in gradual transitions and subtle shifts, and Whittaker, especially, gives to it a performance of astounding complexity. But O’Toole, of course, is the star as his Oscar nomination (his eighth) showed. Even playing fragile old Maurice, who can barely stay on his feet while acting in a period drama that requires some heavy robes, O’Toole generates an extraordinary amount of actorly energy.
Maurice may be something of a dirty old man, but he’s the most agreeable, amusing and poignant dirty old man yet seen on screen. And the most beautiful.