“Masterful with words, but senseless with money,” Ivan Turgenev (Christian Friedel), an old literary foe of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Johnny Flynn), laments about his longtime rival to Dostoyevsky’s second wife Anna (Aimee Lou Wood) in “The Idiot(s),” looking over pages from the “The Brothers Karamazov” author’s novel “The Idiot” and well aware that there’s pressure to finish it when he has a terrible addiction to gambling. Anna wouldn’t know of anyone else she can turn to after the two have moved from Russia to Germany where there’s no shortage of casinos and while a change of scenery seems as if it could be rejuvenating, it has proved anything but for the pair who are scraping by with seemingly no bottom to rid Fyodor of his any of his many bad habits.
Adapted from Andrew D. Kaufman’s “The Gambler Wife,” which brought Anna out of the shadows as a true pillar to the famed novelist and a force of nature in her own right, the film from “Never Gonna Snow Again” co-directors Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert doesn’t paint a particularly admiring portrait of Dostoevsky, whose affection for craps tables has led to him and his wife quite literally not have a pot to piss in when Fyodor has pawned it to keep gambling. But it becomes a quite moving rebuttal to the idea that any great artist’s career is strictly an individual project, particularly as it’s related to commerce when Anna has to take responsibility for both herself and her reckless husband when more than having any belief in him she believes in his talent and she herself has to come a long way from nearly losing the luggage and all of his unpublished writing at the Baden-Baden train station.
At first, it can seem as if Szumowska and Englert are attempting a grand farce as Fyodor and Anna are met with outrageously lavish accommodations in Germany and no sooner than they enter their ostentatious new abode, Fyodor is begging to be called a bad Russian and kicked as part of some sexual kink. But the exaggeration has another effect as it’s the life of luxury that you’d expect the couple to lead when the reality is anything but. While Fyodor can’t control himself around money or women – he starts up a fling with Turgenev’s wife (a mysteriously underutilized Vicky Krieps, who nonetheless makes a strong impression with limited screen time and dialogue) – it appears in part a reaction to some crippling procrastination and although he declares he’s working on his best book to date, most audiences will know “Crime and Punishment” will be a tough act to follow.
Played with boorishness that’s become a specialty of Flynn’s, who did a mean Dickie Greenleaf in Steven Zaillian’s “Ripley,” Dostoevsky can suck all the air out of a room, so as one can imagine he is figuring out new ways to add to their mounting debts, it can seem like a cool breeze when Szumowska and Englert wisely shift their attention to Anna as they are kicked out of Camelot, with the missus shrewdly taking advantage of her position as a transcriptionist for her husband to submit pages to his publisher via Turgenev when Dostoevsky can’t be depended to do so himself. Wood, who proved herself so gifted at radiating an intelligence that belies a doe-eyed innocence opposite Bill Nighy in “Living,” is perfectly cast as Anna, perhaps a bit more accepting than she should be of her husband’s flaws but also entertained by the challenge of making up for them, especially when she can see it serving a greater good beyond either of them.
Although Szumowska and Englert have always been great stylists – and with eye-catching production design from Ewa Mroczkowska and costumes from Anna Englert, it may be a peak achievement on that front, “The Idiot(s)” has a more arch tone both verbally and visually than anything they’ve done before and occasionally it can feel as if they haven’t quite worked out the right rhythm for some of the gags. An anachronistic song choice that is revisited throughout the film is a lovely touch, but when it’s the only element out of time, it threatens to puncture the world more than complete it. But full of bold choices, the film constantly reminds of what Anna has to scheme and fight for throughout, art meant to look effortless by its end that required so much more than anyone could know.
“The Idiot(s)” will screen again at the Telluride Film Festival on September 5th at 9:15 pm at the Galaxy and September 7th at the Palm at 1 pm.