Another film adaptation of another Philip Roth fantasy about a brilliant aging man nursing a sexual obsession for a much younger, earthier, and ironically wiser woman. This time it’s Ben Kingsley lamenting that his young girlfriend does not yearn sufficiently for his “cawk” and Penelope Cruz (who’s becoming a much less awkward actor in English) as the thinly and tritely written object of his lust.

Emphasis on object: Roth in my experience doesn’t particularly understand or value women, and that viewpoint serves his male characters well, manifesting itself in self-important, immature, articulate and complicated guys who don’t value women either. But it’s a shame to see Coixet’s name on a film that does no more for the women in the story, only establishing the dichotomy between the emotional, commitment-seeking, body-image-fixated Cruz and the sex-without-strings, businesslike, and stereotypically masculine in her emotional needs (to reinforce that point, she yells, “I’m one in a million!”) long-term casual lover played by Patricia Clarkson, who is long overdue for starring roles in better projects.

Also frustrating is Dennis Hopper’s character, who merely exists as a smart-talking sounding board for most of the film, and I can’t stand characters like that; it’s such a cheap device to create a character merely to give another character an opportunity to speak his mind. Voiceover narration achieves the same result. Then suddenly we’re meant to care when something happens to him late in the film. There is nothing wrong with a film, or novel, revolving around one character to the exclusion of developing others, but this is more than seeing events through one man’s eyes: the people in his life are barely human, just stand-ins for types.

Despite its shortcuts and final-act flirtation with bathos, it is a basically good movie, but an often frustrating one that strains too hard sometimes to capture a moment artistically. The other Coixet film I’ve seen, My Life Without Me, was at least much more cohesive stylistically, and I think this is a bit of a step back for her. The bulk of my argument is with Roth and not Coixet, but her film doesn’t particularly improve on its source material where it might have.