A Gentleman In Moscow review: Ewan McGregor delights as a dandy trapped in a fancy hotel

If you were waiting to hear the naturally Scottish-brogued Ewan McGregor take on a Russian accent, you’ll instantly be disappointed by A Gentleman In Moscow, the miniseries debuting March 31 on Paramount+ with Showtime. Despite its backdrop of post-revolutionary Russia, the adaptation of Amor Towles’s bestselling 2016 novel does like many other Slavic period pieces—HBO’s Chernobyl, Hulu’s The Great, Netflix’s The Last Czars—and adorns its characters with upper-crust English accents, the screen’s simplest way of signifying something is both old and fancy. When we meet him, McGregor’s Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is not yet old, though he will age several decades over the course of eight episodes, but he is fancy—at least, he was.

There’s no place for the aristocratic old guard in Russia’s socialist new order—the formerly fancy folks who haven’t already been executed by the Bolsheviks have been banished from the Motherland or relegated to scrubbing the floors of sanatoriums. By comparison, Count Rostov’s sentence initially seems lenient; he’s spared death by a Soviet tribunal and is instead ordered to live out the rest of his days under house arrest in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol. Sure, he’ll be shot and killed if he ever sets foot outside and he’s been forced to trade his sprawling suite for a spare attic room, but the hotel’s opulent furnishings, silver-service dining rooms, and extensive wine cellar should make the years fly, no? After all, it’s kind of hard to feel sorry for a rich white guy no matter what decade we’re dealing with.

It’s smart casting, then, that showrunner Ben Vanstone (All Creatures Great And Small) and the powers that be chose McGregor as the eponymous gentleman, replacing the originally cast Kenneth Branagh. McGregor’s Rostov has elements of Branaghian campiness—that twirled mustache looks plucked straight off Poirot’s face and is complemented by a similarly over-the-top permed ’do—but all that initial extravagance and exaggeration is softened by the actor’s sincere eyes and easy charm.

The Count briefly grieves the loss of his former freedoms and fineries, even contemplating suicide at one point, but he largely adopts an air of graceful, good-natured defiance in response to his glum predicament. (“It’s the business of time to change…and gentlemen to change with them,” he declares in one episode.) Alexander finds surprising camaraderie in confinement: the thoughtful staffers of the Metropol, the Soviet film siren with whom he enjoys an on-and-off romance (played by McGregor’s real-life wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead, doing her best Carrie Coon impression), and the Eloise-esque nine-year-old Nina Kulikova (Alexa Goodall) who ends up changing Rostov’s life forever. (The actor’s own girl-dad energy is sweetly felt in Rostov’s tender connection to both the young Nina and—spoiler alert!—her daughter decades later.)

Over the years, the tumult of the politics, poverty, and warfare of 20th-century Russia roars through the rotating doors of the Hotel Metropol, temporarily disrupting the whimsy and wonder of its sumptuous ballrooms and lovingly detailed lounges via a sobering character. Among them are Rostov’s old college comrade Mishka Mindich (Fehinti Balogun) and Osip Glebnikov (Johnny Harris), the party officer tasked with keeping an eye on the Count.

It’s tricky choreography, attempting an intentionally light soft-shoe to the growing thrum of dread that creeps into the Count’s daily routine: propaganda posters of Stalin erected in the hotel lobby, the labels peeled off those beautiful bottles of wine in communist fealty, a man shot dead mere feet from the Metropol’s entrance. The show sometimes stumbles through these tonal shifts—with directing duties shared by Sam Miller (I May Destroy You, Surface) and Sarah O’Gorman (The Witcher, Cursed), the camera often flits between shaky realism and soft-focus dreaminess—but it’s McGregor’s sentimental yet sophisticated turn that ultimately keeps the dance going.

Sure, as on page, some of the dramatic impact of A Gentleman In Moscow is subdued in knowing that no matter what happens to the Count—whether he becomes a waiter or a parent or a spy—he’s going to face said adversity with affability and well-born aplomb. And though the TV adaptation heartily fleshes out some of the novel’s side characters, particularly Balogun’s Mishka and Winstead’s Anna Urbanova, this is still Rostov’s story through and through. McGregor delicately guides the Count through the country’s many political changes and the character’s own internal revolutions, from entitled dandy to devoted dad, and in the process conceives a fine Russian gentleman indeed—accent or not.

A Gentleman In Moscow premieres March 31 on Paramount+ with Showtime