FilmBlather.com

The plot of Vladimir Nabokov's The Luzhin Defence is far less patently bizarre than his Lolita and the film adaptation is far less interesting. The characters and the things they do are unusual enough, but the movie doesn't explore them or their motivations. When a film assumes you've read the novel it's based on, the philistines among us are left in the dark.

The setting is an Italian Lakes hotel in the 1920's, where an important chess tournament is about to take place. The top-seeded players, expected to square off in the finals, are the suave, charming Turati (Fabio Sartor), and the maladjusted, deeply troubled Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro). Natalia (Emily Watson), traveling through Europe with her mother, meets Luzhin and falls in love with him, to the utter horror of her mother, who already all but married her to the far more acceptable Comte de Stassard.

Meanwhile, in an utterly useless subplot, Luzhin's former mentor Valentinov (Stuart Wilson) is planning something sinister. You see, Luzhin let him down way back when, and he abandoned the chess prodigy in the middle of a city square. Now that he has, against all odds, made something of himself, Valentinov is bitter. He wants blood.

I'll grant the movie this much: it is consistently watchable, far more so than the usual "art-house" period piece offering. Perhaps it's thanks to the familiar chess championship structure, complete with an impending Big Game, or because of the amiability of its two stars, especially Turturro. The film's first two acts, though frustrating, are undeniably solid filmmaking, and the characters hold our interest when they're not doing something mind-bogglingly stupid. Director Marleen Gorris never ventures into the truly terrible (how's that for a newspaper quote?).

In the third act, though, we begin to see cracks in the movie's precarious foundation. The characters start to do bizarre, unexpected things, and The Luzhin Defence doesn't even hint at any justification for them. I have been told that the book does, but the movie doesn't, and for our purposes, the movie is all that matters. We are never allowed inside the heads of these people. Why does Natalia fall in love with Luzhin? Why does Luzhin leap out a window? What the hell are these people all about anyway? These are just a few of the questions I had that were never answered.

And then there's the prickly matter of Valentinov's character. What is his purpose, other than to keep the plot moving? I suppose it's nice, in a movie that's so irritatingly ambiguous, to have a character clearly recognizable as the villain, but Gorris goes just shy of painting "SATAN" in big red letters on the front of this guy's shirt.

When a movie isn't careful with its characters, it winds up enslaving them for the script's purposes. Since The Luzhin Defence is based on a novel, this is probably not true in this case, but it constantly seems like it. A really good adaptation has to balance being faithful (most of the time) with being accessable; it has to work on its own merits, not on the book's. Books are not movies.