05/23/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Children of the Revolution
Oh, those daffy communists

**1/2 (out of five)
Starring Judy Davis, Sam Neill, F. Murray Abraham, Richard Roxburgh, Rachel Griffiths, Geoffrey Rush. A Miramax Films release written and directed by Peter Duncan. Rated R, contains sex, nudity, profanity. Running time: 99 minutes.

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

Finding bloody-handed Soviet dictator Josef Stalin at the center of a comedy is as surprising as finding the Jaws shark at a tea party.

But that's the outrageous conceit of the satirical Children of the Revolution, described by the filmmakers as a "black Red comedy."

It's daffy. It's cheeky. It's outlandishly funny, at least for the first 20 minutes or so when the plot is set up and we find Stalin's "Three Stooges" -- Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev, who would later struggle for control after the dictator's demise -- doing a goofy little dance behind him to the tune of I Get a Kick Out of You.

F. Murray Abraham's aging Stalin may have "angina, high blood pressure and be very grouchy from trying to give up smoking," but he can still be frisky. He's instantly smitten with a picture of Joan Fraser, an Australian communist who has been writing him daily, letters that bring tears to Stalin's flunkies who read her missives. Joan is so rabidly caught up in the fervor of revolutionary politics ("Trying to overthrow a government is not a hobby, not like fishing," she declares) that she pooh-poohs any hints that the dictator might have been responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen. "Stalin is all of us," she says assuredly.

And so when she's invited to the 1952 Party Congress in Moscow, it's like Cinderella going to the ball . . . better, since Comrade Joe tries to woo her.

Alas, this whimsical nuttiness doesn't last long. Soon Stalin is dead, Joan returns to Australia pregnant with "Uncle Joe's" son and much of the puckish humor evaporates as the real plot turns up.

The conceit is that Stalin's son, growing up in Australia, contains the seeds of the dictator's grandiose megalomania and one day worms his way into a position with the labor unions where he can threaten to bring down the government. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't have half the humor nor any of the wacky cheerfulness that the first half of Children of the Revolution promised. The film grows increasingly labored.

At first there are some funny moments for little Joe as he grows up -- Joan blabbering about how great he will become while Joe walks into a pole; Joe spouting details of Stalin's life to a startled teacher.

But the mother-son thing never rings quite true. There's not enough give and take between them.

Joan, played with glowing idealism by Judy Davis, who won the best actress award from the Australian Film Institute, is funny at first in her blindsided passion. Yet the character doesn't change until nearly the end of the film. Joan's as rabble-rousing at the end, as she brokenheartedly watches the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union on television, as she was in the early '50s when she'd harangue audiences during an anti-communist newsreel in a crowded movie theater.

Although she eventually takes a wary view of her son's plans for dictatorial conquest, which is not the communist paradise she'd envisioned, mostly it's from a distance.

It's the same with Joan's longtime boyfriend, Welch (Geoffrey Rush of Shine), whom she eventually marries without disclosing the details of her pregnancy even though he loves her very much . . . something that she fails to appreciate in her fervor. A sad man, he's a poignant afterthought to the plot.

Even more mysterious is Sam Neill's Nine, a double -- or maybe even triple -- agent who turns up at crisis points in Joan's life, both in Australia and Moscow. He tells various stories about whom he's working for and remains a shadowy enigma.

The romantic relationship between the grownup Joe (Richard Roxburgh) and a young policewoman (Rachel Griffiths), whom he uses to get in with the police union for his political schemes, seems manufactured.

Writer-director Peter Duncan gets an A for effort in coming up with a highly original concept. It's sometimes sharp and hilariously mischievous in its early scenes, which are played like blackout sketches.

But when it tries to go somewhere, Children of the Revolution is stillborn.