Daily Blague

Anyone curious to see Daniel Craig in action, without supporting the military-indoBroccoli complex, ought to run out and rent Archangel, Jon Jones's film of Robert Harris's 1998 novel of the same name. (I read it.) The BBC production only rarely betrays its origins in television, and the length - just under two hours - also suggests a feature film's crispness. The production is, overall, dandy.

Archangel is about (did I say that?) the possibility that Stalin fathered a carefully-bred child child, a son who was quietly nurtured in the rough countryside outside the eponymous Arctic port that, contrary to the film's say-so, was not built by Peter the Great (Elizabethan merchants did business there). Daniel Craig plays Kelso, an American historian who finds himself drawn into a carefully woven plot that will rely on his credibility as a Westerner to burnish the Stalin legend. Perhaps because he has the sense to figure this out pretty quickly, he keeps his life; a suave Russian intelligence chief (Alexei Diakov) and a bruyant American cable reporter (Gabriel Macht) are not so lucky. Yekaterina Rednikova plays the smart girl who helps Kelso out, and she's terrific, one part Rachel McAdams, one part Sally Field, and one part gifted Russian actress whose English it is a pleasure to hear. Archangel is the best English-language Russian noir since Gorky Park, and it's almost as good, which is saying a lot.