Roll up, roll up, girls and boys and feast your eyes on the glitzy razzmatazz of forbidden romance and pesky pachyderms in a Depression era travelling circus. Beneath this rambling Big Top you’ll gasp and marvel at the bearded ladies and somersaulting trapeze artists, be enthralled by the acrobatic equestrianism and chucklesome clowns. Just don’t peak behind the curtain, because underneath the slickly designed surface is a movie just a few coconuts shy of what it should be, and for director Francis Lawrence, there’s just no riggin’ the game.
Based on Sara Gruen’s bestselling novel, Water for Elephants is touted as grand old-fashioned filmmaking, a stylised melodrama with a big name cast, and a romantic plot to make your heart gush. It opens with an elderly Jacob Jankowski (Hal Holbrook) telling the tale of his unexpected graduation from Ivy League veterinary student to railroad carny animal doc, swigging moonshine and stealing glances from the ringmaster’s missus (an underused Reese Witherspoon), all in the lead-up to one of the worst circus disaster in American history. The young Jacob takes the form of screen idol du jour Robert Pattinson, trying to ditch the histrionics of his glaring-big-haired-vampire day job, but who doesn’t really find anything to wrap his fangs around as this glaring-short-haired-Doolittle.
