A Victorian morality yarn with a thin story and thick make-up

Rating: 5/10 (24 August 2009)

Choosing monochrome for his foray into the smog age and Jack-The-Ripper back-street London, director David Lynch does everything to place his freak-show action far in the past. However, he is exploiting the Elephant Man (Hurt as John Merrick) no less than his "owner" was in the fairground. He offers no explanation for the man's condition, not even from the eminent surgeon Treves (Hopkins) who got the unfortunately deformed man admitted to the London Hospital. Apparently, plastic surgery was far in the future when Treves practised medicine. Not even a dental surgeon was able to sort out Merrick's mouth for him, it seems. Once this is established, the medical dimension is removed from the story and it shrinks into a little morality tale that can barely support a 90-minute feature. There's no sub-plot, for example, to change the tempo, and the civility of Merrick's entry into society is laboured while we wait for the janitor to bring in his paying crowd, along with the wretched, drunken 'owner', and wreck Merrick's life once again. Anne Bancroft's walk-on appearance as an improbable West End actress speaking American and doing a reading of the love scene from Romeo & Juliet is poorly handled as the story clunks along in "and then", "and then" mode. The Elephant Man is a rather tiresome and poorly constructed bio-pic that fails to transcend the age in which it is set, and succeeds only in making a banal point about the gulf between appearance and inner nature, something that Charles Dickens would have handled in one paragraph.