Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny
starring Alan Rickman, Greta Scacchi and Ian McKellan
written by Peter Pruce
directed by Uli Edel
Rating: ♦♦♦◊◊
There have been many movies and books about the Russian priest/holy man/healer Grigori Rasputin (1869 - 1916). I never read or watched any of them. But I have long known who Rasputin was from high school history class, his place near the Romanov royal family in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution, the conspiracies surrounding him, and the fantastic mythology of his depravity and murder. (Poisoned, shot, and finally thrown still alive into an ice-cold winter river in St. Petersburg - with superhuman capacity of mythic proportions, the man just refused to die).
I watched a tribute to the late English actor, Alan Rickman on Youtube, and in the recount of his career I was interested to learn that he made a 1996 British made-for-TV movie about Rasputin. To North American audiences, Rickman is best known for villains like Prof. Severus Snape (the Harry Potter franchise), and Hans Gruber (Die Hard, 1988). In fact, Die Hard was the first of his films I saw in which I knew who he was.
This film starts with Rasputin’s boyhood in a Siberian village. Then it jumps over most of his life until we find him in St. Petersburg - the Imperial Russian capital at the time - where he develops a close relationship with the Romanov family - especially the mother, Empress Alexandra. Even after watching the film it’s unclear to me how Rasputin gained his entré to the imperial family. Anyway, Alexandra’s German birth plus her closeness to Rasputin played very badly in Russian public opinion after the start of the war in 1914 and leading right up to the Czar’s abdication, followed by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. After the 1905 Revolution, Russian society remained highly unstable due to the persistent effects of revolutionaries, like the Communists and other less radical republicans. To survive the turbulent times the Romanov family had to project a good image and cultivate better government. It seems that Alexandra was a rather superstitiously pious person, drawn by Rasputin’s charisma and his apparent skill at controlling the haemophilia of her son, Crown Prince Alexei. His public depravity didn’t help the family. All of this is what we learn in high school history class - those who bothered to take history in high school and, even more, paid attention.
Rasputin was made after the bodies of most of the Romanov family were discovered in 1979, but before their official state funeral in 1998 at the Saint Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg, so some of what appears on film is incomplete and out of date.
As with any film featuring the Romanov family, the audience is undoubtedly drawn by a morbid curiosity about their secretive mass execution in the middle of the night in a small basement room, and the ghoulish disposal of their bodies afterwards. Rasputin delivers. It’s a gruesome dramatization that you can watch for yourselves. It seems impossible for any film featuring the Romanovs to avoid a graphic dramatization of their terrible end. Both the Romanovs as a group and Rasputin as an individual beg to have their stories made into movies, because they’re so spectacular. “Spectacular” as in Wow!, not spectacular in a good way.