The White Crow

Fol­low­ing a mus­cu­lar Cori­olanus in 2011 and an inti­mate peek into the affairs of Charles Dick­ens with The Invis­i­ble Woman in 2013, Ralph Fiennes heads to the loft to dust off the director’s chair for his third out­ing on both sides of the lens.

An open­ing title card describes a white crow as, ​“Unusu­al, extra­or­di­nary [and] not like oth­ers.” It’s the child­hood nick­name giv­en to bal­let super­star Rudolf Nureyev, the most cel­e­brat­ed dancer since Vaslav Nijin­sky, famed for his defec­tion to the West from the Sovi­et Union in 1961.

Said defec­tion at Le Bour­get air­port in Paris marks the dra­mat­ic ter­mi­nus of David Hare’s screen­play, a thrilling sprint to the fin­ish fol­low­ing an extend­ed pre­am­ble through all the famil­iar biopic ter­ri­to­ry. ​“Steps have a log­ic,” Fiennes’ bal­let mas­ter, Alexan­der Pushkin, tells his young protégé, as though lay­ing out the laws of bio­graph­i­cal alge­bra. ​“One idea, one move­ment fol­lows another.”

It’s a ten­den­cy writ large in both Hare’s dia­logue and Fiennes’ image mak­ing, and the result­ing film is an expli­ca­to­ry exer­cise in dot-join­ing, the ulti­mate goal being to plot a psy­cho­log­i­cal course from point A to point B.

Nar­ra­tive­ly speak­ing, this course isn’t tak­en as the crow flies but through a mean­der­ing series of flash­backs. Those of Nureyev’s child­hood, grim­ly desat­u­rat­ed and inex­plic­a­bly in a dif­fer­ent aspect ratio, prove the most redun­dant, while those under Pushkin’s tute­lage in the mid-’50s pur­port to elu­ci­date the dancer’s bur­geon­ing genius and force of character.

“Tech­nique is only a means to an end, sto­ry is more impor­tant,” explains Pushkin dur­ing a pause to Fiennes’ var­i­ous nar­ra­tive and psy­cho­log­i­cal tech­ni­cal cues, ​“Few peo­ple ask, ​‘What is it I want to say?’” It’s a Hare-brained line that speaks more to the deficits of The White Crow than to any illu­mi­na­tion of Nureyev or his art. What is it exact­ly that Fiennes wants to say?

Nureyev’s lib­er­al cre­den­tials, in sex and art, are emphat­i­cal­ly stat­ed, as is his cul­tur­al curios­i­ty and ram­pant nar­cis­sism, at odds with the repres­sive regimes with­in which he’s caged. Yet the film fails, as so many bio­graph­i­cal accounts do, in find­ing a cin­e­mat­ic means to illus­trate the artis­tic process.

We see Nureyev tak­ing in Rodin, Matisse and Picas­so, (“Vital for the dance,” we’re told) but are gift­ed lit­tle of its appli­ca­tion beyond a ges­tur­al match-cut. For a film about the world’s great­est dancer, it’s want­i­ng for more of the man in action. Fiennes may have rel­e­gat­ed him­self to a sup­port­ing role this time around, but the film’s hand­some, care­ful style appears to rec­on­cile itself more with the qui­et, repressed Pushkin than the force of nature at its cen­tre, eschew­ing phys­i­cal­i­ty for reverence.

New­com­er Oleg Ivenko (him­self a pro­fes­sion­al dancer) deliv­ers a charis­mat­ic turn in the lead, but he’s as ham­pered as the rest of the cast by Hare’s clum­sy psy­cho­log­i­cal mansplain­ing. The film isn’t with­out dra­mat­ic ten­sion in the final stretch, but as far as inhab­it­ing the ​“unusu­al, extra­or­di­nary [and] not like oth­ers,” it’s stuck at the bar.