Fractally inept

Rating: Null/10 (17 April 2017)

This movie was fractally inept, from the smallest detail to the biggest concept. The script and director must think its an accomplishment to keep the audience confused. No, confusion is the natural human condition. What is rare is clarity. I despised this movie from the beginning, when it was obvious that they used the Law and Order: Criminal Intent opening. This is where you string as many completely unrelated vignettes together because you are too incompetent to tell a story. Lets torture the audience, like some teen-tease. I remember checking the progress bar at 18 minutes, thinking that at least the movie had begun. I was wrong, it was more like three movies.
While USSR was no paradise in 1953, I have to believe the portrait painted by the book author of total repression represented his homosexual orientation. Yeah, USSR was probably pretty repressive if you were gay. That is wrong and bad, but don't portray every aspect of society as that repressive to everyone from farmers to MGB officers. As the Russian commentator noted here, even by 1953 the USSR was getting less totalitarian. Stalin died in 1953.
The movie was like a dramatization of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood but mixed in with portraits of Waco, Ruby Ridge, the McCarthy hearings, and the Mi Lai massacre. Its as if the movie cherry-picked every horror and excess of the USSR and then painted it as everyday life.
Confusion. Boy oh boy will you be confused. There is a reviewers here that thinks Gary Oldman was the father that adopted Tom Hardy. Another does not think the assassinated farmers were hiding the political prisoner. I have never watched a movie where the editing was so inept that I would be expecting the resolution of some vignette, and pop, I was in a completely different place with different characters maybe at a different place in the timeline. This may have been because the self-indulgent director shot a 4-hour movie and the editor had to smoosh it into a still-too-long 2 hours and 17 minutes.
And the director delights in confusion. Hey, lets have the big mano-a-mano climax be mud wrestling where we can't tell anybody apart. And lets use a lot of Jason Bourne shaky-cam so it is really impossible to know what is going on. Its just the feelings we convey, to show all the characters are confused too. Watch the director commentary of Amadeus where Milos Forman agonizes if his opening scene is clear enough for the audience to know what is going on.
In addition to the incompetent editing and script and direction, the fake accents do grate a little. Otherwise the actors were A-list, as you would expect. That fakeness was not helped by wild implausibility. Even in 1953 USSR, heck, especially in 1953 USSR, does anyone really think a mid-level MGB officer can shoot a subordinate in the back, in his office no-less? I know the book author hated the USSR, but do we really believe that the law enforcement apparatus would suppress murders because its the hallmark of an "imperfect society? Read the Wikipedia entry on Andrei Chikatilo, the real serial killer this movie appropriates. The Russians had 15 prosecutors and 29 detectives on the case. The investigation did implicate innocent people, but that happens in the US every single day. The investigation also solved 1000 unrelated crimes, including rapes and murders. Sure, you could say that was in 1985 USSR, but its not like the 1950s could have been that much different in the attitude towards crime.
Another major implausibility is the relationship to the wife. She loves you, she hates you, she cons you, she betrays you, she stands by you. Its like being married to the Magic 8-Ball. You never know what's going to turn up. Sorry, not based on any reality I have ever seen. Sneaky snarky scumbags stay that way. Oh, and back to confusion, how about when Hardy shows up at some parent's apartment. I thought they were her parents, since, ta da, he was an orphan. But no, the Amazing Kreskin tapped us on the forehead and with no warning or foreshadowing, we are expected to know they are his adoptive parents.
The main conflict here is really office politics. Spy agencies are full of passive-aggressives. they don't go around shooting each other or defenseless Kulaks at the drop of a hat.
Sadly there is no way to fix this mess. Its what economists call a dead-weight loss. You could give the book to the Russians that made Stalingrad (1990), and even they could not coax a good believable story out of this.
OK, who can resist? First, when writing about a mass murderer and serial killer, lets make the main conflict being with him (or her if you want an Oscar). Sure keep it in 1953 USSR, but factually show the hope for the future and changes as Stalin dies. Rather than some goofy spy agency fallen angel, lets have it be a prosecutor, like actually happened in real-life. Lets have Hardy be glad that the totalitarian state is in decline, but the only way he gets closer to solving the crime is by going all Andy Sipowicz NYPD Blue on the suspects. This will let us wonder why humans always resort to violence and repression to get what we really really want.
A nice art-house film disguised as a police procedural. The society gets less repressive as the hero gets more repressive. The crazy killer goes down, so how do we really feel about that? Easy 85 million domestic gross, with great foreign box office. There will always be the action figures and product placements to make this a real home run. People that read the book will be appalled, but there are so few of them, it really does not matter.