Sherry and I vascillate between describing Tiffin as “in the middle of nowhere” and “on the edge of no-where.” In either case, our location means that we miss out on many quality film releases each year since the nearest “art house” is two hours away. Also, as noted elsewhere, 2006 was a rough year for us, and we didn’t get out to as many films as we wished. Therefore, we even missed many highly recommended films that were shown within our viewing area. So, with those caveats, I present my list of the top new release films that I did see this year in no particular order:

• Word Play
• The Descent
• Nanny McPhee
• Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D
• The Prestige
• Casino Royale
• The Good Shepherd
• The Departed

Much of our NetFlix consumption has been TV shows, but I did discover some great older films this year through DVD. Here’s my favorites:

• Hidden Fortress
• Kon Tiki
• The Boston Strangler
• The Eyes of Tammy Faye
• My Neighbor Tortoro
• Jason and the Argonauts
• Sleuth
• The Gleaners and I
• The Tin Drum

I understand why Peter Jackson would make a derivitively original film and slap a Lord of the Rings label on it: sadly, Tolkien has a huge fanbase that will slurp up whatever swill you put in front of it. What I don’t understand is why Marleen Gorris and Peter Berry would use the same strategy for an early novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The Luzhin Defence is a quiet romance that bears a striking resemblance to Nabokov’s The Defense. Both stories feature a former child chess prodigy struggling with inner demons who finds love but is tragically unable to handle life away from the chess board. Both stories feature snappish in-laws and an oily Svengali figure. And both stories include the sad demise of our title character. But that’s about where it ends.

One can understand the need to cut and reshape a novel when bringing it to the screen. Different media require different approaches. What is harder to fathom is why it is that screenwriters and directors think they know better than world-class authors when it comes to the themes and plots of great stories. In the case of The Luzhin Defence, my growing concerns throughout the film came to fruition when Luzhin jumps out of a window and there were twenty minutes left in the film. Sure enough, some foggy shots of a boat and waiting dead relatives appeared. And then the ultimate debasement: the filmmakers tried to tack on a feel-good, redemptive ending to a novel that is unabashedly tragic. It’s so base and pandering that I can’t bring myself to describe it.

None of this is to say that the film is poorly made. In fact, for the first half-hour, I was scrambling about trying to figure out if this were a Merchant-Ivory film. The settings are lush and beautiful. The film score evokes the time period in fresh way and gently nudges the viewer towards sympathizing with the socially inept chess player. John Turturro constrains his over-the-top antics to effect a fascinating portrait of a man who dwells intensely in his head while barely surviving in the physical world. I was concerned at the casting of Turturro since Nabokov describes Luzhin as a corpulent, dumpy man, but rail-thin Turturro made me forget all about that within minutes of the opening. Emily Watson is also compelling as Natalia Katkov. The compassion she has for Lushin comes across as much more than just pity. In a pivotal scene, the reclusive Luzhin fears that he has offended her by not asking questions about her, but Natalia is relieved; she can breathe when she’s around him.

And it is here, in the tender, quiet evocation of a true romance that perhaps the filmmakers stray from the novel in ways that irrevocably harm the story. They confuse a relational romance with a literary one. While The Defense does feature a romance between two people and while that love story does take up a large part of the novel, in the end The Defense is not, in fact, a chivalric tale with a happy ending. It is, in fact, a tragic tale of alienation and the loss of innocence; it may, in fact, be an early refutation of the modernist milieu present in the wake of WW I. To turn such serious and heavy material into a light romance makes it just another story about the beautiful girl who falls for the nerdy guy and is vindicated in the end by proving that he really was special.

As with PJ’s travesty of an adaptation, Gorris gets so much right that it is all the more painful when the film goes so wrong. Had the film simply been presented as a period romance, the strengths of the film could be appreciated on their own. But, by linking the film to the novel, it only suffers in comparison.