An oddly sombre, if not depressing, choice as the closing night gala of the Toronto Film Festival, this tragic story of a nobleman who spurns an offered love then later seeks to reclaim it is dramatically rather inert and otherwise unexceptional. Ralph Fiennes rises well to the challenge of Onegin, conveying the character's shift from arrogance to desolation (his motives remain undramatized in some key respects, but the film is comfortable with its own mystery); Liv Tyler is also as good as she's ever been. The film's brooding atmosphere is sometimes highly effective (such as in an almost unbearably tense duel sequence); sometimes on the strained side, with the sound design introducing an almost other-worldly element into its dramatization of disengagement and decay. Its measured eerieness is never dull, but neither does it have either the visual or emotional sweep of a classic epic, and it ultimately seems lacking in much complexity: the prominence allocated to it by the TFF seems like a potentially counter-productive case of over-selling.
