A Gentleman in Moscow (2024) is a Showtime limited series consisting of eight episodes each about 45 minutes long. The episodes, although shown commercial free, seem to have been designed for conventional TV broadcast -- the shows each contain four interstitial pause that cut to black momentarily, seemingly where commercials could be inserted. The series has good production values with fine, if somewhat monotonous acting by Ewan McGregor as the titular "gentleman" and a good performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the hero's mistress. The program adapts for television a celebrated and popular novel by Amor Towles, a pastiche apparently of 19th century Russian novels by Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and others set during the Bolshevik revolution and the Stalin era thereafter. (The time encompassed by the series is from about 1918 through Stalin's death in 1953.) The TV adaptation differs from the 2010 novel in some significant respects -- and it's not apparent that these changes inure to the benefit of the production. A Gentleman in Moscow is fairly compelling and has two noteworthy suspense sequences that will poise viewers on the proverbial "edge of their chairs." It's all reasonably interesting with appealing characters. But the show is also predictable, rather maudlin in some respects, and, I suppose, trivializes the ghastly history that it dramatizes. Like most limited series, the narrative is padded and repetitious to bad effect; for instance, a charming relationship between the hero and a little girl that intrigues viewers in the first few shows is repeated at greater and more tedious length in the last four episodes when the protagonist finds himself caring for the daughter of the original little girl, grown up now only to end up a mass grave in Siberia. The same sort of thing keeps happening throughout the show, an effect of repetition that is integral in some ways to the premise of the show.
For reasons that are never completely plausible, the 'gentleman', a scion of a noble and aristocratic family, finds himself under house arrest in Moscow. The gentleman, Alexander Rostov (a name clearly alluding to Tolstoy's character in War and Peace) has returned to Moscow for patriotic reasons during the October Revolution. Obviously, Rostov is perceived as a reactionary (in fact, he's completely apolitical) and a potential counter-revolutionary. However, because he (apparently) wrote an anti-Tsar poem a few years earlier, he's viewed as not so much of an enemy of the people as to merit execution. Therefore, he's placed in house arrest at the Hotel Metropole, a showy luxury hotel that the regime is maintaining in its former splendor as a specimen of pre-revolution hospitality mostly for the use of high party officials and visiting dignitaries. Rostov, who has a spectacular suite in the hotel, is moved to a chilly garret in the servant's quarters and ordered to remain on-site for the rest of his life. The movie's gimmick is that, if Rostov, leaves the Metropole, he will be immediately executed. Accordingly, for the 35-year time span dramatized in the show, Rostov is confined to the premises. The Metropole is a petri dish containing all elements of Soviet society and dissent and, therefore, provides the viewer with a highly concentrated perspective on developments in the Empire, including echoes of the Ukrainian holodomor or famine of 1932-1933, the purges and show trials, Stalin's gulags, World War Two, and a hint of the thaw attendant upon Stalin's death and Nikita Kruschev's rise to power. Various characters embody these historical developments, most notably a KGB operative named Glebnikov who forms an alliance with Rostov. Rostov maintains his highly civilized and somewhat aloof demeanor throughout the program, even when he is obliged to serve as head waiter in the hotel's gourmet restaurant. (He wears specially tailored suits and is an expert sommelier; the economic aspects of Rostov's confinement are obscure and never convincingly explained.) In the first few episodes, Rostov is menaced by Glebnikov but gradually wins him over and serves as his tutor with respect to imparting to the apparatchik a veneer of sophistication. Rostov has a close friend named Mishka Mindich. Mindich courted Rostov's sister resulting in some kind of pre-revolutionary scandal leading to the young woman's suicide. This is trite and uninteresting backstory that provides lots of inconsequential sturm und drang and interminable blurry flashbacks but goes nowhere. (When characters become inconvenient in this show, they are banished to Siberia -- this is Mishka's fate.) A precocious little girl is also living in the hotel (it's not clear why nor do we have any sense as to her parents); Rostov becomes her mentor and raises her to be a princess. The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry and the little girl, Nina, becomes a true-believer in the Revolution when she grows to adulthood -- of course, she also ends up in Siberia. More interesting is a character named Anna Urbanova, a film actress who seems casually promiscuous at the outset of the show, but gradually assumes the role of Rostov's constant companion, in effect, his loyal and glamorous wife. Before Nina goes to Siberia to search for her missing husband, she leaves her daughter, also a precocious child, with Rostov in the hotel. Thus, the relationship that Rostov had with the child's mother, Nina, is replicated without any particular benefit when Rostov becomes responsible for Sofia, Nina's daughter. (With respect to Sofia, Rostov is more in loco parentis and, therefore, more possessive and doting.) Sofia somehow falls 20 feet down a stairwell and fractures her skull. This calamity leads to Rostov's one foray outside of the hotel, a trip to a squalid and crowded hospital where, with the assistance of the unctuous and sinister Glebnikov, Sofia's brain injuries are surgically repaired. Stalin's death results in chaos and Rostov is enlisted by a CIA agent to record a conference between party bosses as to the succession. Rostov has to wear a wire and this leads to some predictably suspenseful proceedings -- well-done but territory that will be very familiar to most viewers. (And this plot development is questionable -- why does Rostov have to wear an incriminating wire when all he would need to to do is listen to the party dignitaries in their debate and report on the outcome to his handler, namely that Kruschev will become the new Soviet leader?) In exchange for his service, Rostov bargains with the CIA to accept Sofia as a defector. (She is an accomplished pianist and scheduled to perform with a youth orchestra in Paris.) Sofia's defection, also a very suspenseful and frightening sequence, is the climax of the series. With Sofia successfully ensconced in the democratic West, Rostov and his loyal mistress, Anna, are free to die which, apparently, they do in a slightly surrealistic denouement in the last episode. The hotel is a main character in the show and we see it sometimes as a menacing implacable kind of palace wreathed in falling snow and glaring over the wintry landscape from its mask-like lit facade. The hotel is full of interesting nooks and crannies including a secret passage way into an abandoned suite where Rostov sets up some of his souvenirs -- the roof is shattered and snow sometimes sifts down into the rooms. Nina somehow procured a skeleton key that opens all doors in the Metropole and so Rostov can generally go where he wishes -- he has access to the roof top and can look across the Moscow skyline; on one occasion, he contemplates suicide and is about to fling himself from the parapet when a friend appears to show him some bee-hives on the hotel roof. There's a large cast of re-occurring characters, mostly hotel staff, and a villainous manager who never really gets the come-uppance that he deserves.
The show has some bizarre features that would be inexplicable but for the murder of George Floyd. About a third of the characters including Mishka are Black. This is inexplicable since people of African origin are as rare as hen's teeth in Russia -- even today the population of Black people in Russia is less than .03%. But in this show Mishka, who appears in about half of the episodes is Black as are many members of the hotel staff, including the head chef's wife, as well as many guests at the Metropole including the commissar in charge of the Soviet film industry who is not only of African origin but, also, homosexual. (He's a protector to Anna Urbanova, although not particularly effective in saving her foundering career.) This is simply weird, casts some odd shadows on the pre-revolutionary affair with Rostov's sister, and represents a deviation from Towles' novel. (The role of Anna as Rostov's love-interest is also considerably enhanced and amplified in comparison with the book.) There are some blemishes on the show: the scene in which Sofia falls down the stairwell makes no sense and the ending is confusing and not well-considered. We see Rostov and Anna at a dacha where there are black apples on the trees. This alludes to a folk tale about a tree bearing black apples that is hidden in the middle of a great forest -- if you eat of the black apples, you will forget all your past life and be granted the chance to begin things anew. Rostov and Anna have spoken about this tale and agreed that, although their lives were thwarted in various ways by the Soviet regime, they have no regrets and would not taste the black fruit -- their memories are important to them. So it is confusing to see them at the end of the movie, partly concealed by a long shot, and surrounded by trees bearing black fruit. Has Rostov reconsidered? Is he now prepared to forget his past life and begin again without any memories of his dead sister, his dead friends, his sexual encounters and love affair with Anna, his recollections of Nina and Sofia? The ending is unclear and not in a satisfying ambiguous way -- it's as if the people making the show didn't know how to end it.
A Gentleman in Moscow is discretely didactic and illustrates the importance of good manners and civility. Rostov, despite his various challenges, remains admirable and unfailingly polite and kind throughout the show. He never exhibits any of the brutality or indifference to others that seems to characterize the Soviet regime. As I watched the show, I imagined Rostov, a devotee of literature and the arts, as being akin to Vladimir Nabokov and, in fact, recommend that viewers who like this show read Nabokov's splendid autobiography Speak, Memory. The series advocates civility and gentlemanly conduct and, for this reason, can be recommended for its modest, benign, and fairly charming attributes.
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