Moscow on the Hudson (1984)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

After Robin Williams' death was announced a few days ago, I remembered I bought this DVD years ago at the Walmart I still work at. So I suddenly had the jones to finally watch it and Mom agreed to view it with me. We both enjoyed it though Mom thought it was a bit X-rated with the bathtub scene with Williams and Maria Conchita Alonso. Paul Mazursky made a touching dramady about the struggles of a Russian musician immigrant trying to make it in America with many others from other countries settling here befriending him along the way. Williams was really convincing speaking the language and whatever playing he did on the sax also sounded pretty good. I've always loved him as a comedian but when he does roles like this, it's when I really appreciate all the talents he used to the best of his ability during his lifetime. The way he passed on may have been tragic, but the way he lived was never less than a joy to watch. So on that note, in the words of the character I first knew him as, Mork from Ork: "Nanu, nanu!"

This movie reminds me of how much things have changed in the last 25 years. This movie was still in the days when there was the naive and simple belief that America could be a "great place". Robin Williams brilliantly portrays the Russian circus musician who ends up defecting. Williams plays Alexander with great sensitivity and humor. Russia is portrayed almost as it was. America is not perfect. The black store security guard he meets has a family that hasn't found work in years. Alexander has to work really hard to make a new life for himself. Still, the movie had the Capra-esquire belief that a new immigrant can find happiness in America. I am sad to say that those days are gone. The idea that he and his girlfriend can work it out, and that Alexander can find success in life, has been replaced by "political correctness". Movies like Moscow On The Hudson remind us that the naive and simple days weren't really so bad. We definitely need to recapture that spirit again nowadays.

Moscow on the Hudson is a fabulous example of a pretty-good movie chock full of 1980s artifacts like Jordache jeans, feathered hair-dos and Afro Sheen, that is often surprisingly interesting, sensitive and even occasionally profound -- especially on the level of the victory of the individual soul over totalitarianism, and the defense of American capitalism against Marxism.This film brings back a flood of cultural memories of the Eighties, the decade immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time in the United States when our political and cultural self-esteem matched our economic prosperity. It doesn't hurt that this movie stars a young bearded Robin Williams with heart (and Russian soul!) and a really cute and occasionally nude young Maria Conchita Alonso (a real-life Venezuelan immigrant) full of Italian passion and an ambitious independent spirit.Only in the early 1980s could blue jeans from Bloomies, velvety white toilet paper, supermarket coffee, studio apartments, hot-dog stands, cab-driving jobs, and U.S. citizenship ceremonies be portrayed as symbols -- indeed even weapons -- of democratic capitalism in a world still governed "from Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea" by the totalitarian evil against which President Ronald Reagan called a crusade two years earlier in his famous 1982 Evil Empire speech to the House of Commons.The political content of the movie is startlingly black-and-white by today's standards of multiculturalism and moral relativism when many academics defend dictatorships' "sovereign right" to exist, and so the offhand manner with which at every turn the film's writers Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos deliver praise to political liberty, capitalism and America's unique cultural acceptance of immigrants dedicated to the pursuit of happiness is remarkable. While the way in which their praises are conveyed may from time-to-time seem a little cheesy, sentimental or dated, their profound significance is not diminished.Exactly because capitalism is an economic system as well as a social system, Robin William's character is portrayed as a Russian seeking a remedy for his literal physical hunger and basic financial requirements of life that socialism fails to satisfy. His Russian friend, played wonderfully by Elya Baskin, suffers from socialism's other often dramatized evil -- its humiliating and paralyzing effect on an individual's creative mind and psychology. Perhaps it is precisely because the film's focus is on Williams' character that Moscow on the Hudson at times comes off as exhibiting the over-the-top 1980s commercialism that made it popular then and a little startling in today's Greener age.Russophiles can get a kick out of some of the Russia scenes. Highlights include the drab Moscow Circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard including full-figured women in polyester; sour old babushkas enforcing their place in line; and shoe vendors pushing the wrong sizes. They might also find some treatment of Soviet atrocities like sending war protesters to mental institutions, or neighbors reporting dissidents to the KGB a bit trite, but not inaccurate. Such horrors are no less relevant in Putin's Russia of today (October 2006), where the most recent contract killing of independent politicians, businessmen and intellectuals is journalist Anna Politkovskaya.While I've focused on the political content, this movie is not primarily a political piece, but a love story; and not primarily a love story, but a romance of personal initiative -- of immigrants who choose to reject the oppressive circumstances they left behind and to seize the chance to pursue their material survival and eventually, individual happiness. The aims of the film are high, maybe even too high at times for this light film to be able to achieve fully; but it is definitely touching and fairly deals with the array of issues every immigrant faces on a variety of levels. I personally found the love relationship between Williams and Alonso to be touchingly realistic at times; and the individualistic focus of this film to be refreshing, as well as a shocking reminder of how inappropriately self-conscious the American media has become in publicly asserting the universal truth and appeal of its core principles: freedom and capitalism.

Robin Williams is excellent as a Russian circus performer in New York City with his troupe for the first time, deciding to defect and become a U.S. citizen. After an appropriately dark, though somewhat heavy-handed opening, this comedy-drama from director Paul Mazursky suddenly finds its niche and seldom wavers. It may appear from the early parts of the picture that Williams is giving yet another of his overly-colorful, cartoonish performances, but he too gets into the groove of this project and fleshes out this charming, confounding, complicated man. Maria Conchita Alonso is wonderful as the working girl who falls for Williams (they have terrific chemistry, and Alonso has never been better). A fuzzy, friendly, thoughtful film, a bit too long but occasionally sublime. *** from ****