Now that we’ve added Turner Classic Movies to our Tivo download list all sorts of odd and interesting movies are popping up on our television screen.  Last night, the practicing pessimist in me taking over, I clicked ‘play’ on Crime and Punishment.

Let me say for starters that this was a curiously compelling ‘bad’ film.  Released in 2002, directed by Menahem Golan with Crispin Glover playing Raskolnikov, John Hurt the wily investigator, Porfiry.  Vanessa Redgrave is Raskolnikov’s mother, Sophie Ward is Dunia, his sister and Margot Kidder the desperate wife of the drunkard Marmeladov (John Neville) and mother to prostitute-angel Sonia (Avital Dicker).  So far, so good.

The story takes place in Russia but is moved from 1866  St. Petersburg to post Soviet-break-up Moscow, or at least it seems so from the cars in the road, the throbbing discos and multi-story dormitories.  Since mother Marmeladova still cries pitifully about having descended from the aristocracy while the characters walk by statues and pictures of Lenin and Stalin it’s not at all clear what the purpose of the move is meant to convey.
Glover plays Raskolnikov with wide, constantly flitting blue eyes set in a pasty-white,  moisture slick face — with too nicely washed and bouncy hair to convince he is such a poor student.  John Hurt is decent in his role as the inspector. (Interestingly he played Raskolnikov 15 years earlier in the much acclaimed BBC mini-series  — now on my list.) Redgrave plays the desparate widow Raskolnikov, prostituting her daughter in her desperation to escape their poverty.  Kidder has not much more to do that rail and weep at her drunken husband.

It may be from the necessity of shortening the great novel to fit the two hour twenty minute movie, or it may be Golan’s directing,  but everything — except Porfiry the inspector, seems rushed, popping with energy and emotion without the weight of Russian character and history.  Perhaps it’s the problem with having Brits play Russians.  The wild hysteria of Kidder and the fawning, obsequious desperation of Redgrave are vibrating at much too high a frequency.  Raskolnikov the same.  We don’t get his elaborate reasoning of doing evil to be able to do good; his handing out money and helping the injured Marmeledov just seem part of his increasing anxiety driven madness.  We don’t hear his self comparisons to Napoleon.  It is a picture of mad at the start, mad at the finish.   Still, we are pulled in as he begins his necessary collapse into guilt even as he challenges others to prove his complicity.  His wish to act out his rationally created superman-self  foundering in the heavy seas of his emotions.  Glover’s panicked yet assertive behavior, his perspiration coated face, his facial tics become their own objects of fascination as Hurt slowly talks him  into a confession of his crime. The confirming chess game is nicely played.   Angel Sonia,  never given a chance in the movie to show how she has become so devoted, follows him off to Siberia.

Interesting enough.  Perhaps a point of entry to the novel for non-reading modern high-schoolers.  You could recommend them to the wiki entry as well.  As for myself, I’ll be anxious to see the BBC series and most of all would love to see Josef von Sternberg’s 1935 rendition with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov.  Peter Lorre!