Stalin

This is one of the rare biopics that offer less opinions and more facts. Over three hours long, the movie covers the dictator's life from his exile in Siberia when he took the name Stalin up to his death in 1953. It does not try to feature the then world politics and even contemporary Russia as a whole, nor it wastes further screen time on the social reaction to Stalin's policies too much. It features Stalin and only Stalin. It focuses exclusively on his personal life (naturally, since the movie is narrated by his daughter Svetlana) and his take on the fellow comrades of the party. And the filmmakers remain more-or-less true to the facts, giving neither imaginative shock moments nor just plain history.

Robert DuVall looks nice as Stalin,and his performance is also satisfactory. But I don't know why he used that Vito Corleone accent on him. Did Stalin use to talk that way? I don't know. Julia Ormond does a really magnificent job as his second wife Nadya. Her timid yet free-spirited attitude is nicely portrayed by Ormond. And I also must mention Joanna Roth as Svetlana and Roshan Seth as Beria for a really good job. All the actors lift this movie up to a really higher level. Along with the flawless screenplay, acting is another asset of the film.

It's certainly not a brief, inaccurate retelling, but it's neither a history captured. Hollywood with the help of Czechoslovakian immigrate Ivan Passer and famous movie stars offers quite a simplified vision of a terrible man Stalin and his crimes. The history of Russian revolution and USSR from 1917 till 1953 appears as a screen version of quite honest but so much oversimplified cartoon-like cliches and sketches. For every Russian spectator all the characters (beginning with Stalin) are unbelievable in every way from make-up to behavior. Seems like all of them escaped from an amateurish waxwork museum. Even the magnificent Russian actors Feklistov, Tabakov and Larionov had skillfully degraded and performed very brief roles which is a great shame considering their high level. Quite a Hollywood is an American attempt to warmer a Monster type with a lyrical story line of Stalin's relationship with his daughter Svetlana who is telling the story.

"Josef Stalin's crimes caused the deaths of tens of millions of Soviet Citizens," the epilogue tells us, but you might not know it from watching this film. A few allusions and allegations aside, the impression you get is that of a gangster, Little Caesar maybe, who bumps off a couple of rivals while taking the place of the Big Boy. The few executions we witness are personalized.

It's based on the memoirs of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, a big seller in the 1960s, so one would expect a kind of benign view of the Soviet dictator and, indeed, Svetlana appears to be the only person towards whom he shows genuine affection. He loved his wife, Julia Ormond, of course but mistreated her to the point of suicide. He hated his illegitimate son and kept his own son in disregard. So it's a daughter's view of her admittedly flawed father, but let's keep some things in the family too.

Among the things kept in the family -- simply hinted at baldly or ignored altogether -- are, let me think, (1) the assassination of Trotsky, (2) the purges of the officer corps in the Russian Army during the 30s, the word "purge" being spoken only once, (3) the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, (4) Stalin's not believing the intelligence indicating Hitler was about to invade, (5) the use of "blocking units" that shot any Soviet soldiers retreating, (6) the use of penal details to march across mine field or draw fire from the enemy, (7) the disposal of all spontaneous resistance leaders, Cossacks, and Russians who had been German POWs and possibly "tainted" by Fascist ideology, (8) the disastrous mismanagement of industrialization and (9) the famine resulting from Lysenkoism -- a rejection of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. So, yes, Stalin killed tens of millions of Russians. More than Hitler killed.

It's not a terrible flick, especially considering it was made for television by HBO. The make up is superb and it was shot on location. Some of the actors turn in performances that we can relish -- Max Schell and Joeren Krabbé, for instance. But Robert Duvall slogs through the role of Stalin as he would a puddle of mud. Okay, I think we can all agree that the Stalin we're familiar with was no ballet dancer, nor was he a spellbinder like Hitler. But if Duvall's intent to was to portray the murdering thug as a deliberate ox driving towards a goal, he's succeeded all too well. Julia Ormond, on the other hand, is splendid as Stalin's tormented wife. She makes responsiveness visible. With Duvall it's mostly guesswork.

Most disturbing is what looks like carelessness in the writing. Two examples. This was a seminal period in Russian history, and early on, after we learn of the Russians' withdrawal from World War I, we learn that another war is going on -- "a civil war." Well, WHAT civil war? We never find out. Nothing about White or Red Russians, or Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, or why there was wariness between Georgia and Moscow.

"Trotsky had missed his last chance to stop my father," we hear. We've already found out that Stalin and Trotsky hated one another -- but why? What did Trotsky want that Stalin didn't want? It's enough to drive a dummy like me to Wikipedia.

Still, for all its weaknesses, I applaud its having been made at all. "Our history required Stalin," one character pronounces after Stalin's death. It's more than our history books require. Russia -- its history and culture -- was an adversary for so long that for too many of us it's not much more than a vaguely ominous blank.

I re-watched this film in order to put faces to the names, as I was studying for a Soviet History midterm. In terms of the film's accuracy, it is largly excellent (from what I have read). However, the tendency of the film to separate the good guys (e.g., Bucharin) from the bad (es.g., Stalin, Beria, Ezhov) is not great historiography, but makes the film easier to digest.

It is hard to know what effect the death of Stalin's wife had on him. Clearly the film needed an overarching plot structure to attempt an explanation of a complex man. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get inside Stalin's head. Duvall's performance is masterful, I think, because he manages to capture the LACK of essence of Stalin. If anything, the man was driven by hatred and little else--a hatred that is difficult to articulate, but which was at least admirably displayed in the film.

Initial thoughts- the film is long; inordinately so. I feel this is due to the need to add romance and simple human passion in a film about a man who most agreed was quite sexless. It takes an hour to get to 1928, but the whole of the Second World War takes a mere 15 minutes!!! Not enough opportunity for romance and love during a war that saw possibly 27 million Soviets die, one supposes. I admit my hero Churchill is not the prettiest person to dance with at a Russian knees-up. Duvall seems to be conjuring up a Brandoesque Corleone with huge moustache to add to the epic feel, but here I have a quibble. Whilst I don't have a real problem with his performance (he does seem to have the man down), many have noted his accent. EVERYONE speaks with affected Russian accents. Even though it is set in, ummm, Russia. This is rather off-putting as a result and prevents us from further identifying with the individuals. Now, I can understand Stalin having an accent; as a Georgian, his Russian was thick, guttural and hesitant. To others who embodied the outsider. But why on earth does everyone put on mock-Russian accents? I was rather put off by the stock footage from Eisenstein and theft of Prokofiev's score for Alexander Nevsky at the beginning; it appeared neither as homage nor even acknowledgement to greater talents which the workmanlike music arrangement and film direction paled against. The characters themselves are two-dimensional at best- mere brush strokes although I couldn't have expected more from an American production for people for whom Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin mean nothing. But it's hard to see how such people could inspire a revolution. Lenin is presented in an understated way which is appropriate I think, but few would recognise Trotsky apart from his diffident arrogance and facial hair. His dragging off to Alma Alta was, like much shown in the film, poetic licence. I won't even go on about why Molotov's portrayal is an historic injustice (a scrawny nothing referred to in the film not as "Iron Arse" but rather "Iron Pants") or how Voroshilov's public denouncing of Stalin's actions to his face is absolutely ludicrous- the man widely-acclaimed as stupidest man in the whole Soviet Republic who facilitated the purge of the Red Army, accommodation with Hitler et cet. would not have survived Stalin to die in his sleep if that had been the case, and I can't fathom the reasons for it to have been put into the script except to have a "chorus" to reiterate the obvious to us. This is just my own opinion- after all, I think the two-part "Hitler: Rise of Evil" is a great introduction for students... I teach Soviet history in Communist China and ironically I have to use a proxy just to offer my thoughts as the ruling fascists have seen fit to block IMDb because it refers to a single film no-one has heard of. Check out my site www.tracesofevil.com for historic documents and resources pertaining to this aera!