Assassin of the Tsar

We recently got a package DVD which includes ten movies - mostly from the 90s, I think - and have only watched a couple so far. Last night it was the turn of a strange movie called Assassin of the Tsar. Made in Russia by a Russian director and with a Russian cast and crew, it stars Malcolm McDowell who plays a psychiatric patient, Timofeyev, with his usual intense on-the-edge approach, and also plays a real-life person, Yurovsky, the man who, along with a number of 'comrades', murdered the Tsar and his family. The other main actor, Oleg Yankovskiy, a well-known actor in his native country, plays the new doctor at the asylum where McDowell has been hospitalised for many years, as well as the Tsar. Confused? You should be. 

Even for people who know the story of the assassination, and the botched assassination of the Tsar's father (which is also in the movie), I suspect this film would appear confusing. Timofeyev believes he is Yurovsky, and on a certain date each year (July 16th, if I remember rightly) a wound appears around his neck, a circle like that of a hangman's rope. On another date in August, he also shows extremes symptoms of a stomach problem. Both of these are somehow related to the assassinations. In due course the doctor takes on the role of the Tsar in order to try and treat Timofeyev, but in the process comes to see himself actually as the Tsar, and dies - though not by assassination. Why he comes to take on the Tsar's persona isn't adequately explained, except with a bit of psycho-babble. 

The scenes set in the past where the Bolsheviks are planning to kill the imperial family are full of tension. The scenes in the asylum seem random and unrelated to the rest of the movie, and the whole nonsense of the doctor dying makes no sense. Then there's the woman who's lost her child and who's waiting outside the residence where the Tsar and his family are confined. We have no idea what she has to do with the story. Some reviewers see the film as a kind of releasing of guilt of the Russians in modern USSR. I have no idea, and couldn't see the connection.

The film is in English, presumably with the Russian cast dubbed. Curiously, while they all have accents, McDowell for the most part doesn't. By all accounts there's a version in Russian in which McDowell is dubbed. The soundtrack is also odd: there's music playing a good deal of the time, the usual sort of music that accompanies any film, but it seems to be coming from another room, and is often quite faint.

How this film came to be made and how McDowell got involved in it isn't obvious. McDowell gives it his all, as you'd expect, and is worth watching. But beyond that the film makes too little sense to really engage an audience. 

Echoes

We watched a DVD of The Conspirator last night.  It wasn't a movie I'd heard anything about, although it had a fairly distinguished cast: James McAvoy, Tom Wilkinson, Robin Wright, Kevin Kline, and a bunch of other reasonably well-known faces hidden under various 19th century beards and moustaches.   Robert Redford directed.

It concerns the trial of Mary Surratt, a woman who had the misfortune to be the mother of a young man aligned with John Wilkes Booth and the other men involved with the assassination of Lincoln (and the attempted assassinations of the Vice-President and the Secretary of State).  How much of what we saw was factual, I don't know, but it made a satisfactory drama.  (The story is told in great detail on Wikipedia.)

Booth and his crew used Surratt's boarding house as a meeting-place because of John Surratt's involvement with them.  This fact was used against Mary Surratt to charge her with conspiracy, although it seems likely she wasn't in fact involved in any way more than being a relative and a sympathiser of the lost Southern cause.   McAvoy played her initially unsympathetic lawyer thrown into the deep end with no witnesses on hand, and fighting against a military tribunal; the case was illegally heard by the military rather than a civil court.

The film connects the case in many ways to the state of affairs in American life that surfaced after 9/11, when normality was often overturned, and the military viewpoint allowed to hold sway.  While there is no specific reference to later events, it's evident that the scriptwriters had this in mind.

It's inferred in the movie that the conspirators originally only planned to kidnap Lincoln.  This isn't clarified to any extent, and the film opens with a long sequence in which Lincoln is shot and the Secretary of State violently attacked in his bed (the Vice President was supposed to be assassinated too, but the assassin lost his courage).   Redford produces an excellent movie that holds your attention throughout, even though it seems unlikely that Surratt is going to be let off.  The odds are stacked too highly against her.

Looking back you wonder why these men plotted as they did, when the Civil War was to all intents and purposes well and truly over (official peace is announced in the movie some time after Lincoln's death), but such situations have been a common after-event of wars for millennia.  I was reading again this morning in the book of Jeremiah (in the Old Testament) how, after the Babylonians had finally destroyed Jerusalem (it took many years of various states of siege) and had taken off its puppet king to Babylon, they gave over the governorship of the land into the hands of a Jew named Gedaliah.  Gedaliah seems to have been a man of integrity, trustworthy, capable of keeping the land in a reasonable state on behalf of its captors.   Jeremiah was one of the many poorer people who were left behind in his care.  Everything seemed to have come about as Jeremiah had prophesied, and a certain state of peace reigned.

Except that there was a bloke named Ishmael (he may have been a member of the royal line, as Gedaliah may also have been) who, not content with the state of affairs, plotted to kill Gedaliah.  The latter was warned of this, but chose to ignore the danger - probably as Lincoln himself chose, or had to choose, to ignore the possibility that there would be factions still unhappy with the state of affairs. and that his life might be in danger.

Ishmael assassinated Gedaliah, and many of his followers, and proceeded to slaughter a number of pilgrims who were on their way to what was left of the Holy City.  When violence is started, it spreads to innocent people who happen to get in the way - as we see in the movie where Government aides and others are injured.  Ishmael and his crew were eventually routed by people faithful to Gedaliah, but by that time it was too late for the unfortunate Governor.