Water for Elephants

Directed by Francis Lawrence

(PG-13)

**

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This adaptation of Sara Gruen’s best-selling circus novel is “unexpectedly good,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. Set during the Great Depression, it cooks up a “tastefully smoldering romance” between a young animal trainer and the wife of a despotic circus ringleader. “The material requires utter commitment and belief in the power of the corn,” but if you can make that commitment, you’ll find this gauzy melodrama “completely satisfying.” Yet “a love story has a major flaw” if its leads completely fail to convey that they’re in love, said Richard Corliss in Time. Robert Pattinson “radiates a slow magnetism” as the story’s orphaned elephant whisperer, but Reese Witherspoon is as sultry as a “nice soccer mom.” Things “get so slow and saccharine” in their story that you begin relishing the script’s dopiest lines. Oddly, the movie’s beating heart is its villain, said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. As a controlling husband and brutal boss, Christoph Waltz achieves a “high-wire mix of charm and insanity”; though the performance doesn’t make Water for Elephants “the greatest show on Earth,” it helps make it “a pretty good one.”