'Water for Elephants' is all wet

No one gets tied to the railroad tracks in "Water for Elephants," although every other hoary plot device seems to have been herded out for a rather faithful adaptation of the Sara Gruen novel, and a movie whose ingredients no doubt worked far better on paper than they do on screen: a popular book, an established star (Reese Witherspoon), a boyish heartthrob (Robert Pattinson), a recent Oscar winner (Christoph Waltz) and the whole thing as sexy as a clown car full of circus midgets.

Book-ended by the recollections of one Jacob Jankowski (Hal Holbrook, at his most elder-impish), "Elephants" is the story of the young Jacob (Pattinson), who has to drop out of Cornell's veterinary school when he learns his parents have died in a car crash, and left him nothing. With no home and nowhere else to go, he hits the road, hops a train and finds himself amid the Benzini Brothers Circus, which is under the iron hand of its owner, August Rosenbluth (Waltz). August is more than happy to hire an Ivy League vet for his menagerie of mangy animals; nothing makes him happier, except perhaps having unwanted employees pitched from his moving train, or watching his wife, Marlena (Witherspoon), do her act. Where it's all going, well, the big top itself is less obvious.

There's simply no reason to care about the three-way conflict at the heart of the movie, but there might have been, with a different cast. Pattinson is beyond passive; Waltz isn't hateful enough. And judging by evidence past and present, it may well be that no one has chemistry with Witherspoon -- she's a good actress, with her determined little mouth but passion is not her forte. And passion is what was needed to lift this memory play out of the sawdust.

An elephant ride for Reese Witherspoon

As far as tightly wound actresses go, Reese Witherspoon tops the list. She insists upon a strict sense of order in her life. Her production company is called Type A, a moniker her latest co-star, Robert Pattinson, says fits her strong sense of self perfectly. And even when she appears to be having a spontaneous moment, lamenting that her well-orchestrated career built around an avoidance of bikinis has been breached by her current role as a leotard-clad circus performer, it turns out the line is a well-rehearsed quip that's been repeated, to scores of media outlets.

Which makes it all the more confounding that the 35-year-old actress would subject herself to the unpredictable behaviors of circus animals such as the nearly 9-ton elephant Tai and a slew of trick horses when she shot the adaptation of the Depression-era romance "Water for Elephants." "I have anxiety. I get nervous, and I shake," Witherspoon says. The night before shooting with the elephant, "I didn't sleep, and I literally shook and shook and shook," she says. "But the performances with the elephant were really magical for me. Against my better instincts I decided to ride the elephant with no harness, with no safety equipment. It was pretty great."

"Water for Elephants" is a $40-million adult drama based on a bestselling novel by Sara Gruen. It co-stars Pattinson.

-- Los Angeles Times