A Moscow Gentleman on TV?
It is with unease that I watch the adaption of the Amor Towles novel. Some books just don't translate well to film. The nuance of the written word, and even whole characters, often slip away.
I’ve checked the legs of my surprisingly heavy desk for hidden panels filled with stacks of gold coins, but still cannot find any. The willowy woman upstairs is on yet another wretched Zoom call for her work. I, being a gentleman much like Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, do not have an occupation.
My errand today, as the Commissariat for Internal Affairs dictated, was to visit Comrade Schwab so that his heroic brake fixing workers could attend to the Mazda. Workers of the Wheel, Unite!
I shall dine well this evening, that is true, but it will be fare of my own making, not the magic of Chef Emile of the Boyarsky, the finest restaurant in Moscow, if not all of Russia. My palate will not be applauded by the other diners.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Paramount+, the streaming service — whatever that means — is showing a eight-hour miniseries based on “A Gentleman in Moscow,” the novel by Amor Towles. It began March 29. Here’s a trailer. As I write this, I’ve watched one episode. It was slow, but that’s probably Ok because there’s a lot of story to set up.
The book is great. I swooned when I first read it, telling people that it had immediately jumped into my Top Five, all-time. It has ebbed a bit in my second and third readings, but it’s still in my Top 10. I read his other two novels, “Rules of Civility” and “The Lincoln Highway,” and liked both of them as well.
“A Gentleman in Moscow” is the story of a Russian aristocrat who, in the early aftermath of the Communist revolution, is called to account before party hardliners. Rather than putting him up against a wall to be shot, however, the commissariat gives Count Rostov credit for being on the side of the proletariat when it counted and sentences him to eternal house arrest in the Metropol Hotel, in the heart of Moscow. If he steps outside the hotel, he’ll be executed after all.
For the next 32 years, that is where he stays. He exercises, eats and drinks well, enjoys the company of colorful characters — including a willowy movie star — and endures the awkward, often brutal hypocrisy of the Soviet system.
And that, according to the willowy woman who is my wife, is the problem. “Nothing happens,” she said. “I kept waiting for something to happen.” She gave up reading it.
After watching the first episode, she said its pace perfectly matches the book. It was not a compliment.
One of my friends greeted the news of a screen adaption with a shrug.
“I read it, but I don’t remember much about it,” he said in a text. “Wasn’t it about some old man stuck in a hotel in Moscow?”
Grr.
Well, they have a lot of ground to cover, in the series.
But it can’t be easy, converting literature to TV. Characters and storylines get compressed or cut entirely. Authors often rail about how their work is treated on the screen. Oregon’s Ken Kesey, for example, reportedly hated the movie version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which was a fine movie nonetheless.
To me, the TV series that best captured the tone, spirit and language of a book was the beloved “Lonesome Dove,” which starred Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as retired Texas Rangers who lead an epic cattle drive to Montana. And even that series ditched some of author Larry McMurtry’s characters and passages.
In “A Gentleman in Moscow,” author Amor Towles spends nearly four pages telling us how a solitary figure, a secondary character in the book, limps across Red Square in June 1946 and enters an alleyway at the back of the Metropol Hotel. I’m guessing the scene won’t make it into the series; it probably isn’t necessary.
But in the book, Towles uses the moment to recall Hitler’s 1941 attack on Russia during World War II, with his armies advancing nearly 600 miles in four months and “approaching Moscow from the north and south in a classic pincer formation. Within a matter of days, the city would be in range of their artillery.”
But then Stalin rallied the Russian leadership, brought in hundreds of thousands of troops who had been held in reserve in the East, and the bitter cold and snow of a Russian winter blunted the German air force. Like Napoleon’s armies before him, Hitler’s Wehrmacht went stumbling backward. Estimates vary, but more than one million people died in the campaign.
It is with that backdrop that the secondary character in the book crosses Red Square to the alleyway in back of the Metropol Hotel.
“Dressed in a ragged winter coat, he swung his right leg in a small semicircle as he walked. At another time, the combination of the ragged coat and hobbled leg might have made the man stand out on such a bright summer day. But in 1946, there were men limping about in borrowed clothes in every quarter of the capital. For that matter, they were limping about in every city of Europe.”
So how do you portray that on screen? You don’t.
I’ll continue watching. Probably alone.
I'm with you on the book. Loved it so much that I went on to read his other two novels as well; I really enjoyed The Lincoln Highway. But sounds like I can pass on the TV adaptation.
I met Amor at a dinner with a group of booksellers in a nice restaurant provided by his publisher. Not only was he a charming host, I immediately liked him as a person, warm & very charismatic & at that time working on a project with EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY.
But like your wife, though I devoured his other novels, I couldn't get into "GENTLEMEN" at all. Rambling around a Russian Hotel for over 30 years got old quickly. Lincoln Highway had a STAND BY ME quality to it & RULES of...put you into NYC in the late 30's & made you feel as if you whirled around nightclubs while climbing a social ladder that spirally reversed HOUSE OF MIRTH.
One purging spree day I accidentally put my signed & personalized copy of RULES of CIVILITY in our Little Free Library & before I came to my senses it had vanished. I'm hopeful it grew legs & made its way around a few reading groups needing a boost. If you find it, know I am pining.
I'm looking forward to his new book & happy it finds a way back to the Evelyn Ross character, because at the dinner table, I suggested to him we needed more of her.
I don't have cable, or whatever paid channel that is, so tell us more as you go through the episodes.