`A Gentleman in Moscow' is unlike anything else on TV
“A Gentleman in Moscow” on Paramount+ with Showtime is quite unlike anything else on television. Created by Ben Vanstone (“All Creatures Great and Small”) and largely directed by Sam Miller (“I May Destroy You”) from the 2016 novel by Amor Towles, there's nothing overtly radical about the production or plot, and elements of the story might remind viewers of Wes Anderson's “The Grand Budapest Hotel” or Alexander Payne's “The Holdovers” or Kay Thompson's “Eloise” books. But in its tone and pacing is quite its own creature, at once romantic and controlled, somber and whimsical.
Heartbreaking, heartwarming, sometimes heart-stopping, and as much as anything the stage for a wonderful performance by its star, Ewan McGregor, it collects characters who are flush with emotion but — for reasons political, personal, cultural or as a matter of self-preservation — don't demonstrate it openly. The production, too, maintains that tension between feeling and restraint, which ultimately intensifies the feeling.
McGregor plays Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who, having returned to Russia from Paris in the wake of the 1917 revolution — he “missed the climate,” he tells a Bolshevik tribunal — is saved from a firing squad by virtue of a famous “pre-revolutionary” poem that bears his name. “It is attributed to me, yes,” he tells his inquisitors. And so he is sentenced to lifetime house arrest in the luxurious (actual, still operating) Hotel Metropol, his current place of residence, though he is moved from his plush suite into a bare attic room. (He's still allowed to eat in the restaurant and drink at the bar.)
That is the whole of the premise, really, and almost the series' sole setting, as, from 1922 to
1958, with large tracts of time skipped over, characters come into and out of the Count's small world — which, with its other rooms, and nooks and crannies, proves not such a small world after all.
Though he has fixed ideas about what constitutes proper behavior, the Count (who will become simply “Alexander”) is not a snob, and