1989 is when John Le Carre's novel
The Russia House was published. 1990 is when the film adaptation came out. Glasnost. Perestroika. A sea change both in the Soviet bloc and East-West relations. And this is the context of both the novel and the movie.
Le Carre worked for British intelligence before the success of his early novels enabled him to become a full-time author. For me, his earlier novels set during the heart of the Cold War (e.g.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,
Smiley's People) were his best. In those books, masterfully and without sentimentality, he unveiled a taut world of lies, deception and moral compromise.
With
The Russia House we enter a new world, the beginning of sole American military and political hegemony. It was a brief window of time in which some hoped that resources which had long gone into the arms race would be diverted for more humanitarian purposes. A Russian physicist, Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer), has information which, if made publicly available, would help turn these hopes into reality. Dante tries to pass this information to a middle-aged, hard-drinking, jazz-playing British publisher, Barley (Sean Connery), but it is intercepted by British intelligence.
MI6 convince Barley to liaison further with Dante, and by extension Dante's friend, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer). This is another strong point of Le Carre's: portraying how random civilians get unwittingly drawn into the world of secrets and espionage (see also
The Little Drummer Girl,
The Tailor of Panama and
The Constant Gardener). Connery does a fantastic job at playing the obstreperous, irreverent Barley, who is more inclined to follow his heart than national dictates. Pfeiffer's acting as the morally committed Katya is equally solid, with a fine, believable Russian accent that would make Meryl Streep proud. There are also fine supporting performances by Roy Scheider and James Fox as American and British spooks.
The movie contains good dialogue by Tom Stoppard and great location filming in Moscow and Leningrad. By creating a nexus of conflicting interests, including that of the U.S. military industrial complex, we are left wondering, till just before the end, how the chips will ultimately fall. Nevertheless, the film manages to finish on a flattish note - pat, almost sappy.
In my opinion, the end of the Cold War is around the time that John Le Carre's writing and storytelling began to suffer, and the film adaptation of
The Russia House, particularly its final fifteen minutes, reflects this demise. Increasingly, Le Carre began to try to inject personal, ideological and moral messages into his novels. It doesn't matter if you agree with his assumptions and conclusions (I happen to agree with many of them). It takes a writer with a high degree of subtlety and finesse to weave those kinds of messages into a novel without hitting the reader (and the viewer, if the book is faithfully adapted into a film) over the head and having the story as a whole suffer. And while Le Carre is a very good writer, he apparently does not possess the capability to comfortably pull off such a feat.
Because I enjoyed the first 90 percent of the film I'll give
The Russia House 7/10.
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