The Seagull is an adaptation of Chekhov’s play, which I am not familiar with, for the big screen, and it apparently takes certain liberties in terms of the timeline, which I was not aware of while watching it. It has an ensemble cast, which includes Annette Bening, Saoirse Ronan, Corey Stoll, Elisabeth Moss, Brian Dennehy, Mare Winningham and Billy Howle. It is about how things turn out when a bunch of people come together on a country estate, some family and some friends of the family.
When I was younger and had not seen many movies, I didn’t question many facets of movie making that we take for granted. For instance, I watched a ton of Biblical epics when I was a kid, but even though I intellectually knew that people from the Middle East do not look like most Americans and Europeans, I took for granted the British accents or Charlton Heston as a Hebrew. Other people pointing it out woke me up. It isn’t just about the ethnic makeup of the actors in contrast to the characters that they are playing.
As I got more films under my belt, I began watching foreign films not because I wanted to see films from different regions, but because I was attracted to the story. I can’t say it with certainty, but possibly the first Russian film that I saw was Russian Ark in 2002 in the theaters. Then in 2013, I got turned on to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s work when I saw Elena, which became a gateway drug to his other work. I also watched Russian films by different filmmakers: Aleksey Fedorchenko and Timur Bekmambetov before he came to the US. By then, I had seen a number of films from different regions. If you watch the average American film, it isn’t even like British films. Watch and compare their version with our version of Law & Order. A British film has a completely different sensibility from a French film. Russian films have a completely different baseline from any of these regions. The region that has the most similar sensibility as Russian films is Hungarian films, and I would say not all Hungarian films.
As an outsider looking in, Russian films have an organic, overcast, somber tone. Death is always an unspoken character eager to take center stage. I lose a lot of shorthand context clues in Russian films, which can make certain scenarios seem more surreal and sinister than they actually are, or the moment is sinister and surreal, but the attitude is that things can be far worse so scale back your dread. I have yet to see a light and airy Russian comedy or any Russian comedy other than a single comedian, Yakov Smirnoff from the 1980s, which I don’t think counts. So while I have no baseline Russian comedy film to compare The Seagull with, I know that something is off because it feels more like A Midsummer Night’s Dream without fairies or Much Ado About Nothing. Do plays by Chekhov feel Shakespearean even though the two playwrights are separated by a continent, language and three centuries? I have no idea. I’ve never read a Chekhov play, but I can say with certainty that it does not feel like a Russian movie. On one hand, it should not because other than the author, there are no Russians involved in this production, and the human condition is universal. On the other hand, it is based on a Russian author’s work so by only using Russian names of people and places, isn’t it too shallow to be considered an excellent adaptation? I don’t know, but I was never so swept away by the movie that I did not care whereas I can still watch Heston hamming it up year after year. It may be partially owed to nostalgia, but it is also a function of fun.
The Seagull has excellent production values, mostly great acting and allegedly superb source material, but it also feels highly stylized without the breath of life to animate it so we forget that we are watching fiction. It still has the feel of a play, which is a flaw in a movie except for occasional welcome flashes of well-executed effortlessness. It started off on the wrong foot by not clearly using the How We Got Here trope, which I hate, by showing a scene that occurs later in the play at the beginning of the movie then going back in time. I was relieved that this element of the story was not faithful to Chekhov’s vision, and if I could eliminate from all movies, I would.
There are two major themes of The Seagull: finding fulfillment and oneself through love and work, specifically writing and the theatrical arts. There seems to be an innate casual cruelty in writers for how they treat their characters, their audience and the people in their lives. They destroy beautiful things out of boredom, which is illustrated in a flat-footed scene in the movie involving the titular bird. This bird’s demise symbolizes one character’s fate and the trajectory of several relationships. The minor characters are supposed to be foils that underscore these themes, but feel more like extraneous distractions.
I think that I took the wrong lessons from The Seagull. I’m not supposed to be siding with Irina about her son, am I? Get a job! Is Konstantin supposed to be annoying? If he isn’t, then Howle, who did better in On Chesil Beach, embraced too adolescent a temperament for the age of that character. Can your uncle just have his own moment in the spotlight on his last day, you needy, no talent hack? Did Chekhov use that character to critique his own work? I considered him unbearably pretentious. I know that Stoll did a good job because I was rooting for him even though his story is so cliché, and his character is objectively not a good guy, but he succeeds at portraying him as such. Stoll’s scenes with every character are the best moments for those characters. I honestly could have watched a movie about Moss and Stoll’s characters having an endless brunch. Benning and Stoll’s moment of confrontation seems less pitiful or a moment of willful denial than a heartfelt reunion. Jon Tenney, who plays the doctor that everyone loves, is probably the next most convincing character that I did not think of as a work of fiction. Best performance with no words, i.e. random moments of hotness from gratuitous shirtless scenes, goes to Ben Thomson who plays Yakov.
The Seagull is only a must see if you’re a fan of the cast. It is well executed similar to when people compliment a dead body at a funeral. It seems so lifelike, but we all know that when we go home, we were not touched by the body, but the spirit that once inhabited it and has since departed. It is a lifeless simulacrum of what hopefully was originally a more absorbing and resonant work of art. I felt removed from all the action and at times, it felt like a chore. Next time, straight, no chaser.