Staline

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.

The first person in line for Stalin's purges should have been the makeup designer. Duvall looks almost as unnatural as Hugo Weaving in his mask in V for Vendetta. Considering that he speaks and acts as if he is in one of his Godfather movies, the overall effect is extremely weird and rather one-dimensional.

Perhaps Stalin was indeed simply a very nasty paranoid despot who murdered everyone in sight, but if so this film is much too long, since we get the message very early on.

It might have helped if we could have had more of the history involved - for example how exactly Stalin managed to take power after Lenin's death and his tactics in playing off the right against the left (and vice versa). The show trials could also have been exploited more, as could the wide extent of the purges - and also the minor matter of the Second World War, which is largely glossed over.

As it is, just seeing Stalin liquidate the rest of the film's cast one by one is horrifying but rather monotonous.

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!

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.