Children of the Revolution
with Judy Davis, Sam Neil, F. Murray Abraham, Geoffrey Rush
Written and Directed by Peter Duncan (Miramax)
By Sam Ames
There are very few movies with guts out these days. Many show the literal variety, but few actually dare to navigate uncharted waters, preferring to stay closer to familiar shorelines and taking refuge in formulas (e.g.: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl live happily ever after). If Columbus and Co. were as wimpy as some of the moviemakers out now, we’d still be living on other continents and the Indians would have had the time to develop nuclear weapons.
Children of the Revolution is a courageous dare by first-time director Peter Duncan. He bases the film on one premise: What if Joseph Stalin had a son, and would he turn out just like Old Joe? This could be interpreted as a comedy, tragedy, or as a psychological study on the origins of human character. Unfortunately, Duncan goes for all three and comes up with a disjointed picture. The movie starts as a comedy and is truly hysterical at times, but loses momentum and continuity as it strays into darker topics. To its credit, the film takes some risks where most would have stayed comic, milking bad jokes until the credits roll, but Children of the Revolution tries to do so much that you leave wondering just what kind of film you saw.
Judy Davis plays Joan, a fanatical one-woman Australian Communist movement. She attends rallies, makes impassioned speeches, reads Marx, starts strikes, and gets arrested often. The funny thing is: No one really cares. Australia is just not a hotbed of revolutionary longing. Even her comrades are at best lukewarm about communism which is humorous when juxtaposed with her rebellious zeal. Davis’s performance is outstanding. Her nervous intensity burns everything around her, yet her character is a sympathetic one who joined the wrong cause for all the right reasons. She writes fan letters to Joseph Stalin, too, and they are so passionate that they get his attention and persuade him to invite her to Moscow for the 1952 Communist Party Congress. She shows up in an electrifying red dress and charms everyone. Stalin is knocked of his feet by this vision of socialist beauty, and invites her to dinner, then to a movie, and then to his bedroom. This working class fireball is too much for him, and he dies from a heart attack with a slight smile on his face. Davis returns home pregnant, and marries her devoted lover, played very well by Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush. She has a son and names him Joe, and quickly initiates him to the ways of working class protest. From an early age, little Joe knows everything about Communism and thinks getting jailed is “good fun.” Sam Neill deserves mention for playing Agent Nine, a double agent who becomes a sort of guardian angel to Joe and gives the story some continuity.
The movie’s tone changes abruptly when Little Joe reaches adulthood and transforms into a paranoid tyrant as he gains public office. In a matter of minutes, he switches from hero to villain which leaves a hole in the film that is never filled because the switch is sudden and kills nearly all audience sympathy for the lead character. The actors do their jobs and deliver fine performances, but the script fails them. All is not completely lost, however. Instances like the younger Joe reciting the history of Stalin in front of his elementary school class and older Joe’s attempts to get arrested by a pretty female cop are great laughs as is F. Murray Abraham’s portrayal of Stalin, the swinging bachelor. All in all, Children of the Revolution may not be worth watching in the theaters because of its inconsistent story, but the majority of the film is genuinely amusing, which makes it a great video pick and proves that yes, even totalitarianism has its funnier side.
