Good Concept Falls A Bit Short

sddavis63

I found that I had to think a bit about this movie to really begin to appreciate it. The initial response I had was to treat it as a mildly amusing comedy revolving around an eclectic set of characters that didn't really seem to have much of a point in the end. But there's more going on here than meets the eye at first. The whole movie revolves around the concept of freedom, and how freedom is defined. Produced at the height of the Cold War, I took from this movie a statement that freedom is about much more than a political system.

The first part of the movie deals with Vladimir Ivanoff's (Robin Williams) life in the Soviet Union. Protesters are arrested, Ivanoff is threatened by the KGB for no reason other than that he has an eccentric grandfather and people line up for blocks to buy toilet paper or shoes that don't fit. From what I've read, that's probably an accurate description of life in the USSR. But it isn't as bleak as it seems. Ivanoff has a family he loves, a girlfriend who loves him and wants to get married, and he can pursue his passion of saxophone playing with the Circus. Most important - this guy doesn't want to defect, and he tries to convince his best friend Anatoly (Elya Baskin) not to defect either, when the Circus visits New York City.

The second part of the movie is set in New York. On the spur of the moment, Vladimir defects - at Bloomingdale's. He hadn't planned to. It just happened. Asked by an FBI agent why he was defecting, he answered simply "freedom." And now we begin to learn about freedom. Vladimir tries to make connections. His best friend becomes a black store security guard named Lionel (Cleavant Derricks). Lionel's family parallels Vladimir's (right down to the eccentric grandfather), but it isn't Vladimir's family. Lucia (Maria Conchita Alonso) becomes Vladimir's love interest, but she doesn't want to commit. He can't even play the sax. He waits tables, drives a taxi, becomes a street hawker - all ultimately unsatisfying. For me the most poignant part of the film comes in a coffee shop, in a discussion among the various immigrants. They misquote the Declaration of Independence, and say that the "inalienable rights" of human beings are "life, liberty and happiness." But Thomas Jefferson didn't say that. He said "the pursuit of happiness." Here is where I really began to see the film as a sort of satire about freedom. To be politically free without having one's basic human needs met is ultimately not freedom.

It's an interesting statement. Unfortunately, the movie itself is not that interesting. That's the basic problem. It has the potential to be powerful, but just doesn't rise to that potential. Why? Too much emphasis was put on the immigrant nature of New York City, for one thing. That became - to me - something of a running joke, and I started wondering what the next accent would be rather than following the story. For a movie that tries to make a powerful statement (and a gutsy one, given the political climate of the time) it just came across as too "light" - the sort of movie that you feel you could miss twenty minutes of and step right back into without trouble. The nude scene with Maria Conchita Alonso in the bathtub with Robin Williams (Williams hands roving all over her body) also struck me as in bad taste and exploitative - totally unnecessary to the story.

Anyway, not bad. Once I took the time to think about it I decided to move it up a couple of notches in my estimation. 6/10. Unfortunately, it could have been so much better.

score 6/10

sddavis63 30 December 2001

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0212763/