Circuses were once travelling trains that stopped in cities near a open field, set up their huge tents, sold tickets and the big top show would begin. We may have memories of circus trains being brightly painted, with cages full of exotic animals, like fun animal cracker boxes. But the reality was harsher, as Water for Elephants depicts . . . a film rich with atmosphere, spectacle and the full community of a circus train in the 1930s . . . the performers, the workers, the gang bosses, the manager . . . and the animals . . . from a toothless lion to an astute elephant, Rosie, who pulls up stakes and takes matter into her own trunk, especially when the people she likes are threatened.

We are treated to the grace and beauty of a bygone age when huge tents were raised and lions, tigers and horses were paraded around the crowd, sitting in bleachers and being thrilled by the spectacle unfolding before them on dirt floors.

But behind the glamour and the spectacle, there are men being thrown off of moving trains when there was not enough money to pay them, and animals worked to death. "Around here, everybody works until they are run into the ground."

Robert Pattinson plays Jacob, a veterinary student, who loses his home, takes to the road, and while cooling his heels near the tracks, hears a train coming, so he jumps on board as it passes. "I don't know whether I picked that train, or that train picked me." It turns out to be the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth train, and that troupe has need of a vet for their menagerie. And so, his life with the circus begins.

He meets the manager's wife, Marlena, played by Reese Witherspoon, the post-flapper "main attraction" of the circus (in more ways than one), who rides horses . . . and eventually, the elephant that they acquire along the way. Her husband has a mean streak, first taken out on the elephant, and then on Jacob, when he suspects a love affair.

Director Francis Lawrence notes: "One of the reasons I did Water For Elephants is because it has love, wish fulfillment, redemption, magic and beauty. I hope audiences latch on to all of those things."

The audience must have, because the theater was full, thoroughly enjoying this highly watchable, entertaining motion picture.

-- Thomas Ormsby

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