[imagesource: Paramount+ with Showtime]

There are those who think book-to-screen adaptations make the story worse, but according to the glowing reviews for Ewan McGregor’s “handsome, charming period drama”, sometimes it works out pretty well.

A Gentleman in Moscow, the eight-part series streaming on Paramount+/Showtime, is a rollercoaster of laughter and tears, all thanks to McGregor’s fantastic performance as a Russian Count who loses his title and is stuck living in a hotel attic while 30 years of crazy, totalitarian history unfolds outside.

Based on Amor Towles’ beloved 2016 bestseller of the same name, the series stars McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov, the fantastically moustached aristocrat locked up since 1922 for being an enemy of the state. His prison is Moscow’s swanky Metropol Hotel, where the Count is allowed the highborn pleasures of fine wine, gourmet dining, pampered barbering, sexual intimacies and lobby gossip about political unrest that stems from Lenin to Stalin and Khrushchev.

The only downside is that if the Count sets one foot outside, he will face a firing squad, while a poem he wrote in praise of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution has stalled his absolute execution – except it wasn’t even written by him.

The Guardian‘s four-star review notes that McGregor is “almost as fantastic as his outrageous moustache”, “an intoxicating, swaggering figure of delight” in a show that “renders its locked-down, snow-globe fantasy world impeccably”.

“It is a fantastic dramatic playground that requires a big lead performance to sweep all the pieces together into a glittering whirl. Happily, McGregor’s Rostov is intoxicating when the character is winning and affecting when the actor allows the great sadness at the core of this benighted man to flash across his eyes,” the reivew goes on.

“McGregor’s posture and gait, precise and proper but with the rolling swagger of someone whose default setting is to be delighted by whatever is behind the next door, are as key to the Rostov vibe as his fantabulous facial hair.

While the book, which is fiction set against real events, has been criticised for romanticising the horrors of the Soviet regime by confining the action to the plush hotel, the series rings the same kind of notes as the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest – that of complacency and luxury in the face of unseen horror.

“If I take it seriously,” the Count says, “I could fall into a dark despair.”

Watch A Gentleman in Moscow on Paramount+.

[source:guardian]