“The Elephant Whisperers” (2022), on Netflix, won an Oscar for best documentary short (sometimes the best kind of documentary), and indeed it is a beautiful little film about the caretaking of two orphaned elephants in South India. Director Kartiki Gonsalves observes precisely the goings-on of animals and humans in an appealing, not unpleasant rural area. Elephants enrich the landscape; nothing upstages them. The orphans here have a nobility that somehow leaves us unsurprised that they manage to thrive after being released into the wild.

Forty-five years, in Andrew Haigh‘s 45 Years (2015), is how long Geoff and Kate Mercer, of the U.K., have been married. Tom Courtenay plays Geoff, an aging retiree and liberal fool who begins to distress his wife. Courtenay overdoes Geoff’s doddering and uncertainty, while Charlotte Rampling is true and likable as Kate.

This is a small but meaningful film which presents marriage as a sad cheat. An hour and thirty minutes long, it ends before running out of steam. I said Rampling is likable—so is the film, even if the elderly couple’s lovemaking in bed is rather hard to watch.

Mendel, an old man in Bernard Malamud‘s story “Idiots First,” is about to die. But he must find the entire sum of money with which to send his adult son Isaac, who today would be considered “mentally challenged,” to live with Isaac’s elderly uncle before Mendel does die. The money is infernally difficult to obtain.

In this last period of his life, Mendel’s burden is not really Isaac but Ginzburg, the grim reaper and a creature of “awful wrath.” To this supernatural follower-of-a-cosmic-law Mendel must succumb. The letter kills. But Ginzburg can be cast to the side. And, not a mere “idiot,” Isaac can be rescued for a time.

Malamud’s tale is a provocative jewel wherein a hard life is, alas, followed by desperation. And the tale is edifying.