THE RUSSIA HOUSE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Colorless spy story keeps promising to pay off with something happening, but plot twists are a long time coming. Photography in Russia tries to make it look exotic and interesting, but the rather drab cities are not the best photographic subjects. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4).
At the beginning of THE RUSSIA HOUSE three notebooks purportedly containing Soviet military secrets have been passed to a British publisher and the British want to know if the notebooks are genuine. An hour and forty minutes into THE RUSSIA HOUSE we have seen a lot of Russian scenery, we know some of the characters involved a little better, a fourth notebook has been passed, and now the Americans as well as the British want to know if the notebooks are genuine. That may well be how the spy business really is, but it really is not a very good piece of story-telling. It would be one thing if the evidence built up in an interesting way the way it did in a previous LeCarre adaptation, TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY. But here we are dealing with far less than compelling characters. The two main characters are Sean Connery as British publisher Barley Blair and Michelle Pfeiffer as Soviet publisher Katya. Katya passes the notebooks written by a former lover Klaus Maria Brandauer as the enigmatic Dante. Barley and Blair seem to fall in love for reasons never very clear. This has to be a what's-the- attraction love pairing to rival the one in HAVANA.
Fred Schepisi has taken a script that would move moderately well at thirty minutes and stretched it to a hundred and twenty-three. One way that he has stretched it is to show you the scenery of Russia, mostly Moscow and Leningrad. This plays off the new post-glasnost interest in the Soviet Union; however, it seems unlikely this film will greatly contribute to Soviet tourism. While many of the buildings are of majestic design, the film only underscored the drabness of Russia. That drabness is further emphasized by filming Russia with perpetually overcast skies. The film also unsells tourism by underscoring how much the economy has degraded under glasnost. As Katya complains, "Glasnost gives everyone the right to complain and accuse, but it doesn't make shoes." Curiously, Katya manages to be able to get plenty of eye make-up, as Michelle Pfeiffer's characters always do.
What is curious about the uninteresting background is that the screenplay is by Tom Stoppard, who made Shanghai mystical and fascinating in his screenplay for EMPIRE OF THE SUN. Here, however, he tries to show us not a physical landscape but the figurative landscape of the world of espionage and counter-espionage. LeCarre can make that landscape interesting, but it does not come through in Stoppard's screenplay. I like Stoppard and LeCarre, but I hope they realize they are no good for each other. I rate their result a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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