Nicholas and Alexandra
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Actor: Ania Marson, Janet Suzman, Lynne Frederick, Michael Jayston, Roderic NobleBrand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Georgian (Subtitled); Chinese (Subtitled); Thai (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 183 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-07-27
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Nicholas and Alexandra
DVD Review: Delightful spectacle, disappointing drama
Summary: 3 Stars
Robert Massie's _Nicholas and Alexandra_ (1968), the book on which this film is based, enjoyed great popular success but suffers from one major flaw. Massie's own son is hemophiliac, and his view of Alexandra, really the pivotal figure in this saga, was inevitably shaped by firsthand experience of his wife's emotional turmoil as the mother responsible for her son's illness. Massie thus regarded Alexandra with great sympathy and his account heavily favors her. Until the late 1990s most writings about the Romanovs followed Massie: Alexandra's emotional excesses were excused as those of a distraught mother who could not escape her guilt and grief.
With the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1989, previously unknown Russian archival materials became available to historians and a drastically revised picture of Alexandra appeared. Letters and diaries from Russian political figures, members of the imperial court, and the Romanov family prove that she was deeply disliked and mistrusted by most people around her. She was cripplingly shy by nature (as the film amply shows), but unduly confident in her limited abilities as a political observer. Her health suffered as a result of worry over Alexei's health, but she used her illness to control those around her, particularly her children. She was demanding and emotionally distant from her daughters, and her obsessive watchfulness over Alexei kept him, like his sisters, isolated from other children and incapable of developing the social skills appropriate to their ages. Letters between Nicholas and Alexandra reveal her hectoring attitude toward him, which historians now attribute to her early experience of dominant women, especially her grandmother Queen Victoria. Alexandra lacked Victoria's sound political sense and intelligence, but considered herself cast in the same mold.
Against these sharply revised pictures of Nicholas and Alexandra, the portraits offered in this film seem quaint and outdated. The film is a brilliant visual spectacle, delighting the eye with sumptuous interiors, rich costumes and spectacular jewelry. But its picture of late Tsarist Russian society is skewed by the omission of any reference to the flourishing middle-class urban culture that produced the works of Petr Tchaikovsky and Maxim Gorky. We see the luxury in which the nobility lived, and the abject poverty of the workers; but while Massie's book gives full attention to Russian culture in Nicholas II's reign, the film omits it entirely.
Dramatically speaking, the film is turgid and confusing. Goldman was a gifted screenwriter, his abilities demonstrated in "The Lion in Winter" (based on his own play), but "Nicholas and Alexandra" achieves the level of "Lion" in only 2 scenes. After Alexei has run his sled downstairs and into a closed door, Goldman sensitively extends the conversation between Nicholas and his son into a dialogue between the deposed and disgraced Tsar and his lost empire, Russia itself. A second scene is noted below. But the rest of the film is not up to these levels.
We never have a worthwhile understanding of the relationship between Tsar and Empress. We see them endlessly pledging undying love for each other, or sniping about Rasputin or the way Nicholas ought to run the empire, but little of substance arises from these usually tedious conversations. We learn more about their relationship from the conversation Nicholas has not with his wife, but with his mother shortly before his abdication ("You can't say no to your wife!"). The film deals more satisfactorily with Alexandra's relationship with Rasputin, as most easily seen in their first meeting at the dowager empress's birthday party; here we can really understand how Rasputin played so deftly on Alexandra's fears.
Goldman has a casual attitude to historical chronology, which he seems to alter for dramatic effect even though the record is dramatic enough in itself. I suspect he put Alexei's near-fatal illness at Spala just before the outbreak of WWI in 1914 (the Spala episode was really in 1912)to juxtapose the boy's recovery, and Rasputin's consequent vindication, with the war during which Alexandra obediently appointed inept ministers whom Rasputin recommended, men in whose hands the Tsar's government collapsed in 1917. But if this was Goldman's intention, he didn't make it at all clear to viewers.
Other than Nicholas, Alexandra, Rasputin and the dowager empress, few figures in this drama are fully fleshed out. Even Laurence Olivier's role seems intended only to do what is expected of him, to enunciate some opposition to Tsarist autocracy. For all Olivier's immense gifts and the humanity with which he invests Witte, the character is basically static. The children, even Alexei, are cardboard cutouts, with the girls doing hardly anything more than we would expect high-spirited but isolated young women to do.
The exception is the scene Goldman invented showing Tatiana exposing herself to a young guardsman. It is shocking, but no more so than the proof historians have recently found that during a snap visit to the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg on June 27, 1918, officials discovered Grand Duchess Marie in a compromising "situation" with a guardsman named Ivan Sokhodokov. Goldman could not have known of this event; documents recording it were not available until after 1989. But that he invented the scene involving Tatiana's exposure shows that he had a sense of the frustration the young women felt as they endured imprisonment and faced death. Though his scene involves the wrong Grand Duchess, Goldman's dramatic sensibilities here were indeed on track.
Exactly what "situation" Marie was found in is not described in detail in any document, but the discovery proved that security at the Ipatiev house was unreliable. This realization combined with the approach of the White Army to Ekaterinburg led directly to the local Soviet's decision to execute the family 3 weeks later.
Description of Nicholas and Alexandra
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