Nicholas and Alexandra Blu-ray Review
Bleeding to death from a self inflicted wound.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 16, 2013
It's always interesting to see what a director chooses as his follow up to an immense success, for in the wild and wooly
world of filmmaking, there's probably no better time to actively chart one's course the way one
really wants to
than directly after a critical and box office success. Franklin J. Schaffner had had a rather august career already in
television (winning an Emmy for the original version of
Twelve Angry Men), before moving to film and directing
such well regarded outings as Gore Vidal's
The Best Man and the seriously underappreciated
The War
Lord. Schaffner started to hit the big time in 1968 with the immense success of
Planet of the Apes, but it was 1970's
Patton that really put Schaffner atop the A-
list, with one of those "A"'s being an Academy Award for Best Director. Schaffner had already demonstrated his range
with his relatively few but rather wide ranging film
oeuvre, but his next outing seemed to be his attempt for a
David Lean like majesty of blending an intimate personal story with epochal historical events. Now it should be stated
up front that evidently producer Sam Spiegel reached out to Schaffner after Spiegel's first choice(s) for director didn't
pan out, as there was a lot of money (and prestige) on the line, but it was still up to Schaffner to accept the offer,
which he did. Robert K. Massie's
international bestseller
Nicholas and Alexandra had done a remarkable job of personalizing the last Tsar and
Tsarina of Russia, putting their personal trials (and peccadilloes) in the context of a simmering societal upheaval, all
wrapped around the devastating genetic anomaly of hemophilia. Schaffner chose to bring this epic story to life in a
sumptuously huge production which received quite a bit of critical acclaim and six Academy Award nominations (including
Best Picture), but which never really caught fire at the box office. Perhaps audiences in the early seventies simply
weren't that interested in revisiting a time that seemed too opulent by half and characters that had little relevance to
their own lives. Subsequent years brought a somewhat new (or at least
revived) interest in the subject when
longtime Anastasia claimant Anna Anderson was proven to be a fake after a DNA test, and then when the opening of
long repressed Soviet files finally allowed the remains of the royal family to be found (Massie wrote a fascinating followup called
The
Romanovs: The Final Chapter after the files were released, which I
highly recommend), and so the time may in fact be
riper than ever for a new audience to explore a sad, deeply flawed and yet somehow noble family whose personal
problems and bad decisions wreaked havoc on world history for decades after their own grisly demise.
One of the oddest things about
Nicholas and Alexandra's Tsarist Russia, at least in the formulation of Massie
and
screenwriter James Goldman, is
that while the Romanov family's stupidity in any number of situations is inarguable, they still seem to be at least
putatively
the "good guys", perhaps due to their ignominious end. Rabble rousers like Lenin and Trotsky, who would perhaps be
more likely to be thought of as the heroes of the working class (if we were to ignore all of the horrors done in their
names
after the fact), come off as petulant brats, well meaning perhaps, but brats nonetheless. It's a rather odd dichotomy,
and
one which also may have doomed the film in its theatrical exhibition—after all, we Americans are not used to rooting for
royalty and booing the "common man". But there's a rather odd dialectic at work in this film that may remind some
viewers (as odd as this may sound) of the phenomenally successful series
Downton Abbey: in both cases, there are main
characters who find the world around them changing too quickly for them to adjust easily, but in both cases, the
audience
actually feels
sympathy, not revulsion, for these characters.
Part of what makes the essential tragedy at the core of
Nicholas and Alexandra so believable (despite the film's
rather glossy trappings) is the simple fact that it all
stems from a parent's desperate attempts to manage the precarious health of a child. While Nicholas (Michael Jayston)
might be faulted for all sorts of strategic errors, including a seeming willful blind eye to what current day politicos call
the "optics" of any given situation, it was actually Alexandra's (Janet Suzman) decision to "hire" the quasi-shaman
Rasputin (Tom Baker) to "treat" the hemophiliac child Alexei which the film posits as the overall
worst decision
that either of the royals made. There's therefore a bizarre triangle of sorts at the center of
Nicholas and
Alexandra. If it's not exactly
romantic, there are hints of a sort of illicit attraction between Rasputin and
Alexandra, if for no other reason than that the Tsarina is absolutely convinced Rasputin is the only hope for her
wounded son to survive and ultimately inherit the throne.
Much as with Massie's source novel, James Goldman's screenplay does an artful job of contrasting the rising political
power of the Bolsheviks with the increasingly fragile situation with the Romanovs, both personally and professionally
(so to speak). The film is nonetheless kind of overly episodic, lurching from the continuing health issues of Tsarevich
Alexei (Roderic Noble) to the kind of internecine conflicts within Tsar Nicholas' court as a series of ill conceived battles,
both within and without Russia, begin to fray at the royal tapestry.
Perhaps due to budget constraints, the two leads in
Nicholas and Alexandra were relative unknowns (at least
to American audiences) , with most of the better known names (Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Michael Redgrave, Jack
Hawkins) filling out the huge supporting cast. The film is often impossibly beautiful, with Oscar winning sets and
costumes and lush cinematography by Freddie Young, who of course lensed (and won Oscars for) three of David Lean's
biggest "intimate" epics,
Lawrence of
Arabia,
Doctor Zhivago
and
Ryan's Daughter (
when are we going to see this underappreciated film on Blu-ray?). Schaffner
stages several huge set pieces with a fair degree of élan (though one at times wishes for a more Eisensteinian
approach to what is kind of haphazard editing).
Goldman's screenplay is perhaps too stuffed with minutiae to ever become totally visceral. One of the things that made
his
Lion in Winter so palpably exciting was how
intimately the audience became involved in the family
dynamics of the characters, irrespective of the actual history being depicted. The opposite tack seems to take up a bit
too much of
Nicholas and Alexandra, with an overemphasis on historical facts and figures (some of which are not
actually portrayed accurately) which tends to suck some of the life out of the intense personal drama.
The film is graced with some exceptionally fine performances. Suzman (Oscar nominated) really wrings a lot out of
Alexandra's torment, and Jayston does a fine job showing Nicholas' rather peculiar combination of nobility and stupidity.
The supporting cast is full of fantastic turns. Tom Baker really should have gotten an Oscar nod for his riveting
Rasputin, and Olivier chews the scenery quite convincingly as Count Witte, one of "Nicky"'s confidantes and one who
does not suffer his foibles calmly. The inexorably tragic trajectory of the story may leave some wondering what exactly
Schaffner and Goldman are trying to say, but there's a certain fastidious glamour to this film that, like the very era it
recreates, hearkens back to a time of bygone glories, the likes of which will probably never be seen again.
