Mankin

The producer commentary and a making-of featurette on the DVD turn out to be more compelling than anything we see in `Russian Ark.' It's basically a tour through the centuries at the Hermitage museum and winter palace at St. Petersburg conducted in one 90 minute take uninterrupted by cuts of any kind. A rather sardonic Marquis (sometimes referred to as `the stranger') guides us down the corridors as we see thousands of elaborately costumed extras standing stiffly around waiting for their turn to be photographed. In between we briefly watch Catherine the Great applauding a performance of one of her own plays before rushing off to the bathroom. We take note of the tyrannical Peter the Great abusing his staff. There are a few effective moments along the way: one of the doors opens onto a dark room during World War II and the siege of St. Petersburg, but the Marquis quickly closes it again in horror and off we go back to the Romanovs. There are also pretentiously obscure exchanges between the `stranger' and an offscreen voice, presumably the director, that don't really add anything much to our understanding of the various historical periods. You would think that in the frenetic age of `Chicago' and MTV, where no shot lasts longer than a split second, this approach would be kind of refreshing, but `Russian Ark' foregoes most of the customary pleasures we expect from a movie, such as a plot, characterizations, drama, etc., and substitutes empty cinematic stuntwork instead. The Hermitage/winter palace is certainly a spectacular manmade wonder, but a straightforward documentary tour or travelogue would have been more informative and satisfying in the long run. The most amazing thing about the whole enterprise is that the Russian government gave the filmmakers only one day to do their long take. Considering all the money that would have been lost on costumes, extras, and technical equipment if Sakarov and company had failed to get it, it's awfully hard to believe that they would not have been welcomed back for another try another day.

Emma Thompson certainly does give it her dedicated all as a professor who specializes in studying the sonnets of John Donne, poetry so dense and impenetrable that it's easy to believe that scholars like Dr. Vivian Bearing could spend their entire academic lives trying to get beneath it. I for one did not `get' a lot of the Donne poetry that's quoted in the film, although it certainly does elevate the tone of this high-flown tearjerker. Nor did I entirely sympathize with her plight, as she knowingly and quite willingly signs on as a guinea pig, with full knowledge that this treatment will not cure her advanced form of ovarian cancer and will in fact cause her lots of grief and pain. It's not too clear why she would subject herself to such an experience other than intellectual curiosity and this makes her a pretty chilly character to identify with. The scenes between Thompson and Audra McDonald as a sympathetic nurse come off best, perhaps because the professor seems more human in these than anywhere else. I didn't completely buy the coldness with which she's treated by her doctors, either. She did volunteer for this experiment, so she presumably would be prepared for some clinical detachment. I suppose one of the points of the play was that their behavior mirrored her own severity and aloofness with her students. Perhaps this was why she didn't put up more of a protestation over her treatment. She felt she was getting some of her own back. Still, it would have been nice to see her telling them off with a first class hissy fit every now and then. Mostly, however, she just suffers in silence, as do we.

In his commentary for the DVD of `Gentlemen's Agreement,' critic Richard Schickel spends some of it criticizing the flaws in the movie (something I wish more commentaries would do). Mostly I disagreed with him, especially about Dorothy McGuire's fine performance. She has by far the toughest role in the picture as Gregory Peck's conflicted fiancée, whose complacent belief that she doesn't have an anti-semitic bone in her body is severely tested when he decides to pretend to be Jewish for a newspaper article. I often think of prejudice as the act of automatically assuming something is fact about someone we don't know, based on stereotypical preconceived notions. Anti-semitism is the reference point for the movie, but what it really does is examine the subject of prejudice from many different angles, from its most virulent to its most subtle forms. It even explores the role played by Jewish self-hatred in exacerbating the problem. The only time the film begins to resemble an `After School Special' is in Ann Revere's preachy speech towards the end. On balance, however, `Agreement' is much more complex than it's been given credit for. (I may be too late, but in answer to the User Commenter who wanted to know the name of the main title theme: it's an Alfred Newman original that is only heard that one time in the film. He developed it more extensively a couple of years later in Kazan's "Pinky.")