Disappointment for a huge fan!

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Blistering performances.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I'm rather surprised that no reviewer so far has commented on the rather elementary chess blunder in Luzhin's game as white against an unnamed opponent immediately before the final. Despite the use of Jonathan Speelman as consultant chess expert, Luzhin is shown winning the game with an illegal move. In between the rapid cuts away and back to the board it is not hard to spot that after Luzhin's combination culminating in a queen sacrifice, his rook on d1 is still pinned by black's rook at c1 against his king in the corner at h1. Thus he is unable to play the purported mating move Rd1-d8 which would be illegal - but he's shown doing so to rapturous applause from the audience.

This is clearly a movie made by intelligent people with a sense for setting and costume, music and the right cast for the parts, interesting camera work and a fine ability to move back and forth in time and place without confusing us.The cast is just right - Turturro is playing a part quite similar to others he's played - the wildly eccentric intellectual misfit. (Think of "The $64,000 Question"). The lovely Geraldine James (most famous for the series, Jewel in the Crown - though I later saw her on stage as a wonderful Portia with Dustin Hoffman in The Merchant of Venice) virtually switches parts with her mother's character in Jewel in the Crown - archly conventional, upset at her daughter's unconventionality. (James had played that unconventional sweet hearted daughter in Jewel). Watson again (as in Breaking the Waves) plays a woman willing to sacrifice herself to the love she believes she has found. The problem I have is that the love story seems implausible. I suppose we need to see some flashbacks to Watson's character's past (not merely the reference by her father to her past) to understand why she would fall for this unprepossessing man. E.g., she seems to greatly enjoy the company of the charming handsome Frenchman who seems a far more likely candidate for her affection. Clearly we are not meant to think this love is merely rebellion against her parents - but there just isn't anything else to hang your hat on - to see WHY she is drawn to this man. Watson is a wonderful actress - the features of her face are extraordinarily facile - but her looks are so every-day English/Irish that it's hard to think of her as an aristocratic emigree. She has always struck me as looking like any young woman in the queue for the bus after a visit to the market, or arriving at the dance with her friends. She merges so readily into any crowd. (Cf.: most famous English actresses - from Julie Christie to Diana Rigg, from Margaret Lockwood to Vivien Leigh, Vanessa Redgrave or Madeleine Carroll, Catherine Zeta-Jones or Jacqueline Bisset, Claire Bloom or Catherine Zeta-Jones, from Greer Garson to Jean Simmons to Deborah Kerr or Elizabeth Hurley, Julia Ormond or Kate Winlet or Polly Walker, Natasha or Joely Richardson - they are all memorable looking, stunningly beautiful, generally tall, distinctive - none of this is true of Watson -- who is one of the finest actresses of the lot). I suppose that's to say that she has a VERY common look - though I don't mean coarse looking. There's simply nothing aristocratic looking about Miss Watson. In that sense, she has more of the appearance of the adult Hayley Mills or Rita Tushingham or Toni Collette. She fits more easily into the world of the shopgirl than the aristocrat emigree. So visually, I never DID think of her as a wealthy aristocratic young woman - despite the beauty of her and her family's clothes or the opulence of her surroundings. (Perhaps this is simply more realistic - in real life, I don't find the well-born any more aristocratic looking than the low-born, but in movie convention, they certainly are, and as a viewer, it's what I have come to expect). At any rate, I just don't believe the love story - Turturro does nothing to make me believe that this woman would fall in love with him. **** SPOILERS **** And the moral of the tale is an odd one - the parents strongly urge her against this marriage - they believe he's a terrible match. They believe he's mad and will bring terrible heartache. And bingo! They're RIGHT! He fails to show up at their wedding and commits suicide that very day. The movie makes it seem as if there will be no terrible psychological consequences to Watson's character from all this - yet we all know that there would be. So this is an odd romance - one where the ogre mother is proved right!! A daughter's refusal to listen to her parents has now brought on a terrible (self-inflicted) wound - and aside from the rather silly ending, has ended VERY badly indeed.Moreover, does the movie understand what it's saying with the tacked-on ending? Is it not vindicating the sickness of Luzhin by creating this silly ending? The fiancee unable to help her lover because she's unable to rid him of his obsessions - then shows he was right to have such obsessions? That seems confused. **** SPOILERS END **** I also had trouble believing that the villain would really spend the time and effort and energy and money to go to any length to stop the protagonist -- when they had not even seen each other for over a decade - and the protagonist had never inflicted any injury upon the villain. Like the love story, this remorseless villain just seemed - implausible. The motivation seemed lacking for both the love story and the villainy. All that said, this is a beautiful movie, with fine production values, good acting. Those who loved A Dangerous Mind, Hillary and Jackie, or Rush, or the sort of atmosphere of A Month by the Lake, Enchanted April, Up at the Villa, or Tea with Mussolini -- will probably quite like this movie.

I fell asleep in the first half, that tells you a lot (about the film and my busy week at work). I woke up in the second-half, and to be fair so did the film.Turturro and Watson are fine exponents of the craft. Turturro especially has deserved top-billing for a long time. However, there's little chemistry between them, and this is a film about chess. The most un-cinematic sport there is.

I'm not sure what the people who produce a movie like this are really thinking. Even though I can appreciate an adaptation that radically alters plot, setting, and dialogue (I'm thinking here of Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye", which I've just recently seen), "The Luzhin Defence" tampers with the book's intelligence. Did the director and screenwriter think that Nabokov's characters were too boring? Didn't wear nice enough clothes? Talked too little? Or was the book not melodramatic enough for them? The combination, book and movie taken together, is itself something out of a Nabokov story; one detail of the story might have been the producers waiting for the author to die so that they could adapt his story in a way he would never have stood for.