Navalny (2022 | USA/Russia/Germany | 98 minutes | Daniel Roher)
When asked how he sees the movie of his life, Russian opposition presidential candidate Alexei Navalny bristles at the suggestion that his real-life story be depicted as a dry historic drama. It’s a thriller, Navalny asserts. And with that proclamation by its subject, filmmaker Daniel Roher literally opens the curtain on what turns out to be one hell of a thriller—and much more.
Navalny covers the activist/political gadfly’s efforts to reform Russia’s corrupt current regime, his near death by poisoning, and the exposure of his would-be assassins with the kind of pacing and dazzle usually reserved for the most riveting fictional paranoid thrillers. That breathless cinematic approach fits its subject famously: Navalny’s resolutely a politician of the 21st century, using his wizardry with social media to further his cause. He’s also well aware that making real social change in this age takes a unique sort of showmanship, and he plays to myriad cameras with the charisma and humor of a movie star (with his intense blue eyes and lanky good looks, he comes off as a combination of Steve McQueen and Anthony Michael Hall).
Alexei Navalny makes for a beguiling focal point on his own, but every player here coulda walked in from Central Casting. In addition to his tough-as-nails, equally charismatic wife Yulia, journalist Christo Grozev registers as a geeky, wittily charming, and resolute sidekick, and investigative journalist/Navalny ally Mariya Pevchikh displays enough presence to be the subject of her own documentary.
You could almost criticize Roher for painting Navalny’s rogue’s gallery of bad guys with farcical broadness, but said real-life heavies don’t need any help on that front, thanks. When Navalny and Grozev learn the identities and phone numbers of Navalny’s would-be assassins, the ostensible monsters turn out to be grunting, laughable imbeciles: In one of the most jaw-dropping, hilarious real life moments you’re likely to see all year, Navalny calls one poisoner and tricks the thug into spilling the beans on the murder attempt, in ludicrous detail. Later, Vladimir Putin himself makes a brief appearance via press conference footage, and his petulance and snowflake whininess steer the political thriller that is Navalny squarely into Dr. Strangelove-level absurdity. Make no mistake, however: The clubfooted stupidity of Putin and his Kremlin Keystone Cops doesn’t make the stakes—or the danger—any less clear or present.
Roher directs the story with the velocity of a freshly-fired bullet, keeping the saga compulsively nail-biting and taut throughout. That said, the approach does mute the nuances, complexities, and contradictions in its subject. And as Josh and Chris eloquently brought up in our SIFF 2022 roundtable, Navalny’s no saint. Roher briefly questions his subject’s alliance with Russia’s far-right nationalist faction at one point on camera, which Navalny spins as a marriage of convenience necessary in opposing Putin’s regime. But the simple reality of that alliance—and other statements and views not addressed in Navalny—represents a Pandora’s Box of unresolved issues that uncomfortably stick in one’s craw.
Then again, Alexei Navalny’s apologized for a fair amount of his missteps and statements (though not all of them, frustratingly). And while it would have become a deeper, more complex character study by directing a sharper focus on its subject’s imperfections, Navalny remains a sharp, incredibly well-realized real-life adventure, with one seriously involving element just beneath its surface: Sometimes, when there’s a certifiable monster at your door, better that the good fight’s waged by a deeply, concerningly flawed knight in tarnished armor than by no one at all.
Navalny opened the 48th Seattle International Film Festival; it is now available on CNN and will be on HBOmax later this spring.
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