THE RUSSIA HOUSE
With Sean Connery, Michelle Pfeiffer, Roy Scheider, James Fox, John Mahoney, J.T. Walsh, Ken Russell, David Threlfall, and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
With Robert Redford, Lena Olin, Alan Arkin, Tomas Milian, Raul Julia, Richard Farnsworth, Mark Rydell, Daniel Davis, and Tony Plana.
Ironically, though Havana is set on the eve of the Cuban revolution (Christmas 1958) and The Russia House is set in present-day Russia, Havana comes closer to reflecting contemporary American attitudes. One easy explanation for this is that Havana’s director (Sydney Pollack) and screenwriters (Judith Rascoe and David Rayfiel) are all American, while The Russia House’s director is Australian (Fred Schepisi) and its screenwriter is Czech-English (Tom Stoppard), adapting an English novel by John Le Carre.
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Of all the Christmas releases I’ve seen so far, The Russia House is the only one I look forward to seeing a second time. I haven’t yet had a chance to read Le Carre’s novel–first published in 1988 and, significantly, already available in Russian translation–though I’ve dipped into it enough to determine that the plot has been reshaped for the film in at least a couple of important ways: the novel’s narrator, a former legal adviser known as Harry who now works for British intelligence, doesn’t figure in the movie at all, at least not with the same name or narrative function, and the ending has been sweetened Hollywood-style. But Le Carre’s jaundiced view of spying, which I know from other novels, is still very much present in the movie. And I tend to agree with Thomas Pynchon’s remark about Le Carre that he “has upped the ante for the whole genre” of spy fiction and novels of intrigue–largely, I think, because of the feeling for moral nuance that he brings to the subject of cold-war espionage. (One might add that an acute feeling for moral nuance is largely what links Schepisi’s rather disparate films, including The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Barbarosa, Roxanne, and A Cry in the Dark.)
Pfeiffer does a remarkable job of impersonating a Russian woman. Equally adept are the various intelligence operatives (including Roy Scheider, James Fox, John Mahoney, and film director Ken Russell, making his first extended appearance as an actor). And Tom Stoppard, one of the ablest English playwrights around, has written literate and intelligent dialogue that bolsters the fine ensemble playing.
I don’t have much of a problem accepting Jack as either a character or a narrative premise, particularly because he clearly derives from the prototype of Rick in Casablanca, a prototype that has been fairly serviceable ever since. But I do have a problem accepting Robert Redford as a replacement for Humphrey Bogart, and not only because he’s approximately a decade older (53) than Bogart was when he played in the earlier film. The fact that Redford is older should help rather than hurt the character, since the prototype’s cynicism is anchored in his weary sense of past experience. Even in his early 40s Bogart had the kind of face–with tortured eyes suggesting fires inside a crater–that reflected this sort of depth. But Redford has never suggested anything comparable, and there is reason to doubt that he ever will. The blandness of his good looks has always seemed to suggest more the denial of a past than the registering of experience, sour or otherwise. It would appear that he wound up in this part mainly because of his long-standing association with director and coproducer Sydney Pollack. (Their six previous collaborations are This Property Is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman, and Out of Africa.)
