by Chrissy Lewin

The risk one assumes when seeing a film based on a book that the reader consumed in a twenty-four hour period like a box of truffles, alternatively devouring and forcing oneself to slow down and savor, is that it can be such a huge disappointment that the audience feels personally betrayed.  Sometimes, though, the gamble pays off, as it did with Water for Elephants, the film adaptation of Sara Gruen's novel of the same name.
From its opening scenes of an elderly man in a dark, rainy parking lot too late for the matinee performance, the film beckons us to come a little closer.  What is it about carnivals and circuses, their glossy, twinkling, musical surfaces, that makes it so tantalizing to peel back the layers and glimpse the seedy, sepia-toned underbelly?