It’s taken me longer than I intended to resume The Kurosawa Project — in part because I was out of town for two weeks, and in part because I was simply too daunted by The Idiot’s 166-minute running time to ever feel like popping it into my DVD player. But imagine the despair the executives at Shochiku must have felt when Akira Kurosawa delivered his four-and-a-half-hour director’s cut of the film. Apparently, Kurosawa’s dream version of The Idiot no longer exists, and Kurosawa fans must make do with this condensed version instead, which the studio ultimately chopped down without Kurosawa’s approval. It’s not exactly the most elegant editing job in movie history — their treatment of the film’s first half hour is shockingly clumsy, with several scenes ending abruptly and long paragraphs of text scrolling across the screen to fill you in on what happened in the sections they removed. Usually, when a studio takes a movie away from a director, they’ll at least try to sand down the rough edges and make the finished product look cohesive, right? Not here, and it’s as if the film breaks a fundamental trust with the viewer right out of the gate — obviously, this isn’t Kurosawa’s fault, but it’s as if the movie is telling you, “Look, we’re not gonna work too hard at properly laying out this story for you. Just go along with it, okay?”
The Idiot eventually settles down into a certain rhythm, but I can’t say as I ever cared about any of the characters. That’s partly the fault of studio interference, but I think even at four and a half hours, this movie would probably be a pretty inert experience. This is, I regret to say, the first film I’ve encountered in The Kurosawa Project that I actively disliked — and yet, ironically, it’s also the one that Kurosawa, a huge admirer of Dostoevsky’s novels, felt most passionate about making. Kurosawa was apparently drawn to the idea of a pure-hearted man whose gentle presence has a way of bringing out the worst aspects of the people around him, but I don’t think he ever quite solved the problem of how to make his saintly main character — named Kinji Kameda instead of Prince Myshkin — dramatically interesting. Kameda is a singularly annoying figure who does nothing but stand passively in the corner, watching helplessly and wishing the other people in the room would behave more nobly. And Masayuki Mori (“The Man” from Rashomon) gives an utterly monotonous performance in the role — someone should invent an Idiot drinking game in which everybody takes a shot every time Mori clutches his collar.
Then again, all of the actors seem unsure of themselves in this movie. Far too many scenes consist of characters having conversations and then inexplicably exploding with pent-up anger at someone — Kameda is a social outcast on account of his epilepsy, but it kinds of seems like everybody onscreen is prone to seizures. It’s as if everyone has been directed to project no emotion other than slow-boiling, sullen intensity!!! Toshiro Mifune, playing one of Mori’s romantic rivals, is able to survive simply by glowering charismatically (if motivelessly) through every single scene, but other actors aren’t so lucky, especially poor Setsuko Hara, who has a silent, late-in-the-film confrontation with Yoshiko Kuga in which her facial contortions recall Andy Richter’s staring contests with Conan O’Brien.
One thing The Idiot does have going for it is a vivid sense of place. Kurosawa, of course, was always a genius at using weather to add texture to his stories, and here, the blizzards and snowdrifts and howling winter wind choking the story’s Sapporo setting are a more vivid presence than any of the characters. I almost wished Kurosawa had done even more with the cold and the ice — for instance, there’s a visually arresting scene at an ice carnival, where half the town takes to the ice dressed in wild costumes, that feels a little truncated. (Of course, in Kurosawa’s preferred version, maybe this sequence really was longer.)
Maybe I’m just not on this movie’s wavelength, or maybe everything was explained much better with the missing two hours put back in, but there are three main male characters and two female characters in this movie, pretty much all of whom wind up either in love or courting or paired up in some kind of potential romantic relationship, in almost every male-female combination, and I have to admit, I could not follow the logic of why any of them felt attracted or not attracted to the other at any given time. I guess people’s passions can be pretty arbitrary, but it doesn’t feel like that’s the theme Kurosawa wants to express here. I finish most of Kurosawa’s movies feeling wiser about human nature than when I started; this is the first film of his that left me wondering if I were maybe an idiot.
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