Millions of people have read Amor Towles’s globally successful 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, and so debate has raged about who should play his impressively moustachioed protagonist, Count Rostov.
Some fancied Richard E Grant for the role. Benedict Cumberbatch and even Kenneth Branagh were also raised, but rest easy, fans: Paramount+’s eventual pick, Ewan McGregor, is exceptional.
This tender yet captivating eight-episode story follows the life of Count Alexander Ilych Rostov (McGregor), who has been placed under house arrest in the opulent Metropol hotel in Moscow during the Russian Revolution.
Rostov is of aristocratic stock, but is spared a death sentence by the Bolsheviks: some years ago, you see, he also happened to write a poem (well, it was attributed to him) which became a call to arms amongst the revolutionary generation.As a sort of next-best compromise to death, Rostov is marched from a Bolshevik tribunal into the hotel where he will spend the next 30 years of his life.
Despite the constraints of his locked down circumstances (the parallels with our own lockdown are obvious), the erstwhile Count is a beta-type, who builds a big life in his small, enclosed world.
He forges familial relationships with hotel staff and guests as the Metropol evolves into a miniature city opposite the Kremlin, housing long-lost friends, the politically opposed, the romantically involved, and although Rostov is prohibited from leaving (if he does, he’ll be shot on sight) he gives the audience a lesson in the power of quiet rebellion. “They can take away your house or your rooms, they can’t take away who you are,” he tells his young friend, Nina (Alexa Goodall), a fellow hotel ‘guest’, also living this isolated life.
Yes, the narrative and McGregor’s playing could do with more bite at times, the early episodes drift somewhat and a little nastiness would’ve gone a long way in injecting some required pace to proceedings, but McGregor’s Rostov had me deeply invested in his survival.
It's become virtually impossible for a period drama to be staged without it looking like it’s been partially lifted from Wes Anderson’s creative department, but A Gentleman in Moscow escapes that by a whisker. Of course there are echoes of the Grand Budapest Hotel, but the set design and costuming have a depth and elegance which comes across as authentic.
The Metropol is a Narnian labyrinth of rooms, representing the lies and subterfuge that swill around the hotel between the guests, the politicians, apparatchiks and staff. There is so much deceit that eventually the truth ceases to exist and the Metropol becomes a fantasy land; as hotel business goes on as usual inside, beyond the building’s heavy revolving front door, a bloody uprising consumes the streets, that as the audience we rarely see.
Those revolving doors spin like a wheel of fortune for Rostov, bringing in new guests and life altering moments – some brutal, some carrying opportunity and some with love. Rostov declares that “the heart must always be a priority,” and the love on display here is influenced by the changing times in which he and his friends find themselves.
To that end, McGregor plays opposite his real-life wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Rostov’s love interest Anna Urbanova, a starlet with whom his fate becomes intertwined. I can't say the chemistry is remarkable, but it's a stellar interpretation of a slightly awkward, unlikely and unique love story.
There is also depth and subtlety as we witness Rostov move from a young man to an ageing father figure. Will he simply sink further into a state of acceptance, and see out the end of his days in the attic of the Metropol – or will he eventually stage a brave escape? If we are looking for a clue then it might be found in one of the script’s best lines: “If one does not master one’s circumstances,” says Rostov, “one is mastered by them.”
