MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Kafka’: A Beautiful, Confusing Letdown

Imagine Franz Kafka as the Columbo of Prague, scuttling hither and yon, trying to solve what may or may not be a crime. Imagine the poor man getting involved in a pseudo-Kafkaesque plot that evokes great imaginative works of fiction and then serves them up with the sensibility of “Mission: Impossible.” Imagine anything you like, you will have difficulty imagining how much of a letdown Steven Soderberg’s “Kafka” finally turns out to be.

Soderberg is the extremely talented young director whose deservedly lionized “sex, lies, and videotape” proved a revelation to movie audiences just two years ago because of its carefully nurtured emotional honesty. Apparently fearful of being typecast as the sensitive Woody Allen of his generation, Soderberg has brazenly made a 180 degree turn here, coming up with an elaborate, artificial, distant film where everything of interest resides in an admittedly gorgeous surface.

While Lem Dobbs’ script is laden with both visual and verbal references to Kafka’s work and is careful to be true to the basic facts of his life, “Kafka” does not have biography on its mind. Rather it intends, in the director’s words, to be “a fictional meditation” on the themes the writer made his own.

Given that Kafka’s fiction, among other things, all but invented the fearful and inexplicable nightmare menace of modern totalitarianism, that idea seems to be not a bad one. In practice, however, watching a fictional Kafka trying to unravel a mystery in a world he might have created turns out to be as disjointed and confusing an experience as watching Marcel Proust turn secret agent and single-handedly squelch a violent plot to restore the Bourbons to the throne of France.

Though Soderberg’s success with “sex, lies” enabled him to put together a splendid multinational cast, including Alec Guinness, Ian Holm, Jeroen Krabbe, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Oscar winner Jeremy Irons as Kafka, the real star of this production is the gorgeously Baroque city of Prague. As intoxicatingly photographed by Walt Lloyd in elegant, exquisite black and white, Prague in 1919 is a romantic’s dream, a brooding, shadowy city as menacing as it is picturesque.

Kafka, however, is oblivious to its beauty. As a mild-mannered clerk in an insurance office, writing unimportant reports for unimpressed superiors during the day and under-appreciated fiction at night, Kafka doesn’t seem to notice much of anything at all. Then, one day, his best friend Eduard Raban disappears. Kafka asks his co-worker and Eduard’s friend Gabriela Rosman (Theresa Russell) if she knows anything, and the answers he gets confuse him even more.

The story of “Kafka” (at the AMC Century 14, rated PG-13) is in theory fairly straightforward, as Franz K. attempts to find out what happened to his friend and why. Neither the script nor Soderberg, however, seem capable of telling it in a straightforward way. So oddly comic moments, passing references to other films (a score reminiscent of “The Third Man,” a character named Murnau) and awkward lines like “Oh Kafka, will we see you at the cabaret?” make you wonder if this meandering mystery will ever get untracked.

Unfortunately, when “Kafka” finally has to come up with a solution to its myriad puzzles, the result is so cheesy and unimaginative it’s impossible not to feel not only cheated but also disheartened. What is the point of all that careful photography, the fine if under-utilized cast, the occasional Kafka-like cadences to the dialogue, all those enigmatic references, if the plot is finally so trivial that the man himself probably would have been embarrassed to even read it, let alone have his name associated with it? There is a lot of promise in Soderberg’s career, and some of it in the early stages of this film, but by the time “Kafka” is all over you’ll wonder how even the inevitable “Anything the kid wants he gets” hysteria that greeted the success of “sex, lies and videotape” ever got this vehicle off the ground.

‘Kafka’

Jeremy Irons: Kafka

Theresa Russell: Gabriella

Joel Grey: Burgel

Ian Holm: Dr. Murnau

Jeroen Krabbe: Bizzlebek

Armin Mueller-Stahl: Inspector Grubach

Alec Guinness: The Chief Clerk

Pricel presents a Baltimore Pictures production, released by Mirimax. Director Steven Soderberg. Producers Stuart Cornfeld, Harry Benn. Executive producers Paul Rassam, Mark Johnson. Screenplay by Lem Dobbs. Cinematographer Walt Lloyd. Costumes Michael Jeffery. Music Cliff Martinez. Production design Gavin Bocquet. Art director Les Tomkins. Set decorator Joanne Woollard. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.