‘The Idiot(s)’ Review: Aimee Lou Wood Stars as Dostoevsky’s Wife

As she finishes transcribing what will become one of her husband’s most enduring masterpieces, Anna Dostoevskaya (Aimee Lou Wood) cannot contain her excitement: “This is our best novel yet!” She quickly corrects herself, of course — “I mean, your best novel” — but by then, we understand she had it right the first time.

Sure, those might be Fyodor’s words on the page, and his name on the cover. But as Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert’s shrewd, playful The Idiot(s) reminds us, not even singular geniuses really do it all alone. If the film ultimately overstays its welcome, it’s hard to fault it for wanting to let this unsung companion luxuriate, for once, in the spotlight.

As Anna, Wood projects both unpolished brightness and an impressive force of will; it’s a mesmerizing combination that keeps the character from ever feeling like a mere victim of her circumstances, even as her life takes the harsh turns of, well, a Russian novel. If anything, the character’s initial introduction calls to mind Wood’s earlier breakout role on The White Lotus. Here as there, she’s the sweetly enthusiastic romantic partner to a grumpy older dude who seems determined to hate the new country they’re visiting from the moment he sets foot on it.

It’s just that in this case, her S.O. is not some revenge-driven man of mystery but a writer drowning in debt and stymied by writer’s block. But The Idiot(s) makes clear right away that it isn’t interested in the usual serious biopic clichés about serious men doing serious things. This Fyodor, played by Johnny Flynn as a comically exasperating combination of buffoonish confidence, abject self-pity and childish petulance, is first seen glowering at a woman peeling hard-boiled eggs on the train, a fantastically overwrought classical soundtrack underlining the unreasonable intensity of his moods.

He says things like “Tolstoy’s gonna shit himself” (of the novel he, Fyodor, is definitely for sure gonna start writing any day now) and “Kick me in the face” (to Anna, as part of a kinky foot-fetish debasement ritual). It’s not that the filmmakers doubt his talent as an author — the caption to that aforementioned opener, “9 a.m., the last days of November, during the thaw,” is the first of multiple affectionate nods to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot — so much as they recognize that reverence for a person’s work need not necessarily translate to admiration for his personality.

The couple have arrived in Germany ostensibly so Fyodor can work on his next project. The creatively tortured, easily distracted Fyodor, quicky sets about doing anything but. When he’s not out partying with the very upper-crust literati he claims to disdain, including rival scribe Ivan Turgenev (Christian Friedel) and his coquettish girlfriend (Vicky Krieps, alluring but underused), he’s blowing all his money at the roulette table. When he is at home, he oscillates between drunken glee and utter despair. Whenever Anna sneaks a peek at his notebooks, she finds either blank pages or doodles of naked women, not a word of The Idiot in sight.

It would all be very depressing for poor Anna, were it not for the fact that The Idiot(s) does its best to keep the phrase “poor Anna” from entering your mind for as long as it can. For one thing, the film is too busy having fun to let itself stew in misery. It’s stuffed with mischievous anachronisms like a 19th-century performance of “Take On Me,” the A-Ha hit whose pleading lyrics could double Fyodor’s entreaty to a fed-up Anna. And it delights in outrageous rococo details, like a restaurant dessert that’s essentially chocolate mousse being squeezed out the anus of a porcelain dog.

More crucially, the screenplay, by Szumowska, Englert, Kasper Bajon and Brid Arnstein, paints Anna not as some passive observer to Fyodor’s bad behavior but an active (albeit only fitfully successful) guardrail against it. As her husband gives himself over to his worst impulses, it’s Anna who nudges him to work, who tries to get the bills paid, who even, as things get dire, secretly writes and submits pages on his behalf to mollify his angry publisher. While Anna may not always be in control of her own fate, there’s never any doubt she’s in possession of her own agency.

True, she’s making the choices she does in part because she has few others: Living in a foreign land without even enough cash for a train ticket home, Anna would have a tough time leaving Fyodor even if she’d wanted to. But, The Idiot(s) makes it clear, she doesn’t especially want to.

Anna loves Fyodor truly and stubbornly, and he loves her back in his own inconsistent and imperfect way. Key to the film’s portrait of their marriage is the frisky chemistry that courses between them when they’re holding hands in bed or engaging in silly dirty talk about hard-boiled eggs. For all the relationship’s intolerable flaws and harrowing lows, it’s not without true affection.

Anna’s indulgence for his antics is another thing, however. As the situation deteriorates to the point that Anna’s pawning off her chamber pots and eating scraps off the streets, it becomes harder and harder for us as viewers to forgive his sins. Perhaps that’s why The Idiot(s) gives over large chunks of its bleaker second half to absurd dream sequences.

But arriving as they do in the umpteenth iteration of the same repetitive cycle (Fyodor losing his money, begging Anna for more, losing it all again and then some), these sequences land not only as unnecessary drags on an already puffy run time but as an uncharacteristic failure of confidence. We don’t require a clip of Fyodor fleeing from a boulder-sized roulette ball to tell us he’s being crushed by his gambling addiction when we’ve already seen that he is; we don’t need to see him plead against charges of chauvinism before a guillotine when we know exactly how poorly he treats Anna.

Then again, if the clunky pacing of the film’s latter chapters remind us of anything, it’s how long Anna toiled to help bring The Idiot into the world. Compared to all those long years, what’s a few extra minutes of sitting and watching her struggles on a screen? “Every Russian writer should have a wife like you,” Ivan marvels at one point, moved by Anna’s strenuous efforts to help her ungrateful and oblivious husband. What The Idiot(s) impishly suggests, by demonstrating all the invisible but essential labor Anna’s poured into his books, is that a lot of them probably already did.