Moscow On The Hudson

Paul Mazursky’s film about a young Soviet circus musician (Robin Williams) who defects to the United States at the end of an American tour is a banal exercise in Capra-esque propaganda for, to quote the title of a citizenship training manual held prominently to the camera by Williams’ Vladimir Ivanov, “Our American Way Of Life”.  

The film opens by setting up Vladimir’s miserable existence in Soviet Russia before having him defect in that mecca of consumer capitalism, Bloomingdale’s.  Vladimir swaps his family of stereotypical lovably crazy Muscovites for a family of stereotypical lovably crazy Afro-Americans as we follow the story of his assimilation, via a series of remarkably easily-acquired jobs into the melting-pot that is NYC.  Mazursky and co-writer Leon Capetanos run through a Roladex of clichés in the service of establishing America as the land of the free, a brief obligatory moment of doubt in the film’s dying moments nothwithstanding. \ Indeed, what appeared to be a refreshing reality check turns out to be a set-up for a final flag-waving affirmation of allegiance to free enterprise, even if that means getting mugged by crackheads.  Mazursky, with the aid of Australian cinematographer Don McAlpine, packages the message with out-of-the-box superficiality and glib is the film's rhetoric that it doesn’t even bother to justify its title.

There are occasional moments of humour but they are few. The best news is that Robin Williams, relatively early in his film career, has not yet fallen into the kind of standardized holy fool performance, a caricature that that this film helped him to establish and that he would subsequently roll out time after time.  Indeed he is actually well-suited to the role, his facility with Russian being quite impressive. That, however, hardly justifies nearly two hours of hackneyed sentimentality.

 

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