Review of Venus (2006) by Befani G — 15 Jun 2010

I expected a Lost in Translation-esque buddy dramedy, but instead this movie was pretty dull. There were some good scenes between screen legend Peter O'Toole and his co-star Jodie Whitaker, but it wasn't enough to make this movie recommendable.

Whitaker's character was pretty annoying and her overreactions to little things were unbelievable. This movie lacked much of a narrative and thus it could not hold my interest. Even O'Toole's character wasn't that interesting.

He pulled a Seth Rogen/ George Clooney in this movie and basically played a variation of himself: a drunk and fast-talking old timer. Like Rogen and Clooney often do, O'Toole was still able to offer charm even though his acting was lazy.

The premise of this movie is pretty simple: O'Toole is an old actor who is suffering from a sickness when he starts a friendship with the young relative of one of his buddies. It doesn't move into romantic territory or anything, the relationship between O'Toole and Whitaker is kind of like the Murray-Johannson relationship in Lost in Translation.

Back during the Oscar run of 2006 I was pulling for O'Toole to snag his first ever Oscar as I'm sure most people were, but he lost to Forrest Whitaker (it's kind of strange that O'Toole's co-star in this movie share's the first name of Forrest Whitaker's character in The Crying Game and Forrest's actual last name.

Coincidence? I think not.). Now that I've seen Venus, I can say that O'Toole's performance was not award worthy and I'm fairly certain that Forrest Whitaker deserved his trophy for The Last King of Scotland, a film I still have yet to see.

Overall, this was a dull movie with a few good scenes. On a side note, this movie had a nice musical score, the opening and closing images were perfect and poetic, and there were two scenes that used well-placed music (the scene where Jodie Whitaker's character sticks her head out of the limo and the ending).