Yet another grand Hollywood story, but with plenty of flaws.

Rating: Null/10 (5 January 2007)

While much better than Lean's "Ryan's (Slutty) Daughter", it has a number of flaws, some similar to that film; like it, the acting is mostly wooden and the dialogues aren't much better. And miscasting is evident. Shariff is bland and seems out of place. Guinness and Richardson look about as Russian as Queen Latifah, and Guinness acts like a robot in his character's earlier-life segments. Geraldine Chaplin can be no one's love interest; the woman is plain ugly. (Down with nepotism!) Someone like Shariff wouldn't give her a second glance (and would regret for looking at her the first time, and might vomit for a while), even if he did grow up with her. He should get a medal for all the hugging and kissing scenes he had to endure with her, and it must have been an immense relief and pleasure for him to have kissing and hugging scenes with Christie, as well. Geraldine Chaplin's face reminds me of that mentally-retarded banjo-playing kid in "Deliverance". Courtenay is also miscast; plus: not all that Russian-looking either. Steiger, and in particular Christie, make the best impression. Christie's charisma makes up for some lack of emotional spark in the movie. As tragic as the events in the movie are, it isn't all that emotionally involving. The kids in the film are bad actors; the kid at the very beginning stands at the funeral looking so bored I could have sworn he could hardly wait for the shot to be over so that he could play with his Superman doll. Shariff's son slaps him on the face without emotion, or reason, for that matter. That whole scene looks fake.
The story's greatest weakness is its series of outrageous coincidences; everyone seems to be bumping into each other - and this is the vast Russia we are dealing with, not some remote village in Wales. There are about a half-dozen of these "chance meetings", and they eventually start eating away at the movie's credibility. The ending, where Shariff dies from a heart-attack upon seeing Christie for the first time in many years and after having chased after her, is so overly dramatic and far-fetched that his death doesn't have the impact that it should have (plus, it was clear from Guinness's intro speech that he'd have to die eventually).
Still, the cinematography is very nice, and any movie that can make me sit through it for three hours has to be interesting enough to warrant that kind of attention. I have to add, though, that there are somewhat dull moments, as well. Some scenes are plain irrelevant; e.g. when Shariff stops writing poetry to go briefly outside and get the wolves away from the house. Later, Christie expresses her fears to him about a wolf outside; I would think that with all the communists about, the least of their worries should be the damn wolves. The train sequences in the middle also weren't too interesting. There is a blatant historical error in the film: it is implied that Lenin and his gang overthrew the Tsar. Not so. Lenin and his demented squad of maniacs overthrew those who overthrew the Tsar. The October (November) Revolution is a myth in a sense. (Go look it up.) The main melody is a classic, I guess, though a bit too uplifting for this sort of story, and is played mostly when Shariff is looking at the Moon or observing the flora. (The melody has then been even more immortalized by being used on the first Mr.Bungle album.)