Crime and Punishment (1998) (Patrick Dempsey, Ben Kingsley)
Made-for-TV movies have this hue about them that is hard to define. They obviously must conform to specific running times and cannot stray too far from the content regulations that govern them. Yet every once in a while, a TV movie rises above your typical Judith Light fare and actually becomes ambitious. Such is the case with 1998's Crime and Punishment, which is a perfect example of why casting is so key to these network projects -- instead of Richard Crenna, Tracey Gold and Robert Urich, we (mercifully) get Ben Kingsley, Julie Delpy, and Patrick Dempsey.
In fact, it is Dempsey -- not Kingsley as one might expect -- who plays the Russian citizen Rodya Raskolnikov, and he's actually not half bad. The key to playing an intellectual character such as the revolutionary student Raskolnikov -- which Dempsey seems to latch onto -- is to hint at his unspoken thoughts during the passages when he cannot express aloud what is actually going through his head. After all, Raskolnikov has decided to murder a local pawnbroker who is cruel and without compassion. Although he has convinced himself by justifying her death as a necessary action, the arrival of her sister at the scene of the crime incites him to commit a second murder in order to eliminate any witnesses, and thus begins the inner trauma he experiences.
The players here are for the most part quite good, particularly in their attempts at Russian accents. Eddie Marsan is aptly jovial as Raskolnikov's best friend Dimitri, Lili Horvath is accordingly innocent as Raskolnikov's sister Dounia, József Gyabronka is maliciously conniving as Dounia's persistent suitor Luzhin, and Julie Delpy plays the saintly Sofia with a self-assurance that supercedes the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold stereotype. The real meat and potatoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel, however, has always been the psychological chess match between the police detective Porfiry (Ben Kingsley) and Raskolnikov. While a couple of their conversations aren't as suspenseful to watch as they are to read in the book, the tension is still established fairly well at a couple of key moments.
I found a lot of the sets and settings were admirably presented; I believe much of Crime and Punishment was filmed in Poland. The filmmakers were obviously obliged to condense certain expository passages from the 600+ page novel, but it still touches on some of the major themes, including the superman/Napoleonic complex aspects and Dostoyevsky's commentary on social class systems. In the end though, nothing can really match the book in terms of the moral and ethical debate that rages inside Raskolnikov's tortured head. If one concedes this point as simply unfilmable, then the production does as well as can possibly be expected.
