‘A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW’ REVIEW: EWAN MCGREGOR AS A COUNT IN LAVISH EXILE

The Hotel Metropol, wherein Count Alexander Illych Rostov is “exiled” during “A Gentleman in Moscow,” is like a handblown Fabergé snow globe balanced on the mustache of Joseph Stalin. It is a sanctuary, a bubble, and a sneeze at the Kremlin could cause catastrophe. It is, in one sense of the word, fantastic.

So is the series, in the other sense of the word. A consistently surprising and even restless bit of storytelling, its eight parts roll out along the corridors of the Metropol as an interconnected series of events, rather than a clumsy collection of episodes; the narrative is fairly seamless, yet startling in its twisting layout. It stars Ewan McGregor, never better, and a cast of charmers led by a revelatory Mary Elizabeth Winstead. And it is a skewering of both past and present: Outside is a world of Stalinist terror, famine, mass murder and proto-Putinesque paranoia. Inside, Alexander manages to maintain something of the old order, maintaining his shock of poetical Parisian hair, his hussar’s handlebars and his wardrobe, thanks to a cache of gold he has hidden in a bedpost. More importantly, he maintains his sense of self.

The luxe life can’t last forever, naturally, and his fortunes ebb and flow, but what remains static over the decades-long story is the chemistry between Alexander and the family that forms within the walls of the Metropol. Closest to him will be three women—Anna Urbanova (Ms. Winstead), the film actress who will become his lover; Nina (Alexa Goodall), a girl of mysterious parentage and great affection for the count who as a child shares his intramural journeys and capers; and Sofia (Beau Gadsdon), whom Nina will later leave on his doorstep en route to Siberia. While the Soviet order brings out the worst in almost everyone, Alexander brings out the best. His standards become those of the hotel staff—they, like those singing characters in the animated “Beauty and the Beast,” are long-neglected dinnerware inspired by duty. Alexander is not overly concerned with protecting himself, or regaining the estate and title he has lost. He is kind to children. And he has that vanishing quality, a sense of honor. To a certain degree, it is contagious.

When the series begins, in 1921, fundamentalist Bolshevism has not yet calcified, though the Revolution has reached the wholesale-execution stage. Having returned from France in 1918, Count Rostov is marked as the classic enemy of the state thanks to his education, manners and land (appropriated) and perhaps because he’s been at the Metropol for four years. (Why? “My house was burned down.”) He is brought before a tribunal, which seems inclined to have him shot. But because he wrote a pro-revolutionary poem in 1913 (“It was attributed to me,” he says, cagily) he is spared death and ordered to remain in the Metropol for the rest of his days. It is far from the harshest sentence being handed down.

Alexander is not exactly Eloise at the Plaza, but the place is a fascination to him, and to us, a warren of secret units and closets that provide safe and barely accessible hideaways. (At one point, he actually breaks through a wardrobe and finds a portal to a shuttered inner space; perhaps C.S. Lewis should have a writer’s credit.) Nina and he scamper about the Metropol, though he is constantly harassed by the likes of Osip Glebnikov (a terrific Johnny Harris), a true believer and high-ranking official with the secret police. As Osip tells Alexander quite plainly, the Metropol is allowed to function because it provides the monitoring of anti-revolutionaries. Osip also demands that Alexander tutor him in the ways of the high-caste “criminals” he has to deal with. It becomes a series-long seduction of East by West, Osip eventually chastising Alexander for having not read De Tocqueville.

With all due credit to showrunner Ben Vanstone; Amor Towles’s novel and Ms. Winstead’s tendency to steal every scene (from her husband, Mr. McGregor), “A Gentleman in Moscow” is very much about the actor and his Alexander Rostov. The count is a marvelous creation, whimsical but never unaware of the fragility of the ice beneath him, as he skates through modern Russian history, from the Old World into something new.

Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.

2024-03-28T21:36:22Z dg43tfdfdgfd