Venus

Peter O'Toole was nominated for the Oscar for best actor for his performance in Venus (2006). It is amazing that he has never won the award, though he has certainly been recognized in other ways. Venus is a character study of an elderly actor, Maurice, approaching the end of his days, who falls in love with a young woman, Jessie, who wants to be a model. She and he are of entirely different generations and have virtually nothing in common. She is indifferent to him as an old man, and all she has that he is attracted to is her youth and sexuality. He recites Shakespeare to her when she doesn't even know who Shakespeare was. In part, the film is about how she comes to accept and understand the humanity of an older man. In part, it is about how he exploits her in a certain way to gain her affections. All that she offers him is the opportunity to kiss her neck or touch her fingers, though late in the film, attempting to get him to rouse from what appears to be a coma, she bares her breasts to him (he does not respond).

The film never suggests that there is any real possibility of a physical relationship between them. In fact, midway through he undergoes prostate surgery and is left impotent. The real question is whether there can be some kind of other understanding between them. The girl reminds O'Toole's character of his youth, his own romantic life, his love of art and beauty. She becomes interested in him when she realizes that he really was a person of substance, a celebrity of sorts, and also a potential source of money when she wants a dress or a gift. Gradually she begins to exploit him, allowing him those glancing caresses in return for money or an item of jewelry. Things come to a final head when Maurice discovers her in his apartment having sex with her boyfriend .

Will Maurice come to accept his old age and the approaching end of his life? Will Jessie learn that life is not only for the young? Will she ever move outside her own selfish self-absorption? Will her uncle, and Maurice's friend Ian, ever cease to be a doddering, semi-senile, inflexible, unresponsive old codger? These questions are answered as one would expect them to be in such a film. O'Toole's acting does deserve an award. With a slight turn of his head, a subtly upturned lip, just the way he glances or breathes, the way he hesitates before he delivers line, he shows an incredible talent. Most of all it is the sadness in his eyes, a sadness that suggests that in his performance here he brings to bear more than a little of his own situation in life—that of an aging, elderly actor near the end of his career.

In one scene in a church, O'Toole and Ian dance comically together to chamber music and then gaze on the memorial plaques of other actors who died before them. They bear the names of real actors—Laurence Harvey and Robert Shaw, for example—that O'Toole himself knew and worked with.

This movie is sweet, charming, gently comic, and sad. It is not for anyone who has recently had prostate surgery or who faces the same shortening prospects in life as O'Toole's character.