'Children of the Revolution': Commie Dearest

In the brilliant new "Children of the Revolution," Judy Davis's revolutionary ardor is like a hot blue flame: It eats through everything, including her own life. Then why is it so funny?

The movie is one of those brilliant and rare blends of paradoxical elements -- both the tragedy and the folly of history, the weight of inheritance, the pressure of the ideal, lots of fairly steamy sex, even a secret agent or two. It's a novel by Joseph Conrad as reinterpreted by the Marx boys, Groucho and Karl, with a fast rewrite by Tom Stoppard.

The film is built of ersatz documentary devices, like carefully structured interviews, phony archival material and pure flashback, all tracking back from an Australian political crisis. The participants in the madness of the past four political decades look back on the twisted tragedy of Joan Fraser and her boy Joe, named for his father.

That Joe would be Mighty Joe Stalin, of Moscow, Russia. Joan -- Davis's gritty, one-pointed intensity is hilarious when deployed for comic effect -- is a believer so true that her faith feels like bliss and sex combined; she's rapturously blind. Beautiful and ditsy, seething with intensity, she sees class warfare and the heavy weight of capitalism/fascism/materialism everywhere. She could never speak the words "military-industrial complex" with irony. She wouldn't even recognize the concept of irony.

But in the stolid, muttony Australia of the late '40s and early '50s, her communist passion is as futile as it is boring. In fact, only her beauty and sexual incandescence hold together the party -- a dim mob of Joan-worshipers, including Geoffrey Rush. But in far-off Moscow, somebody has noticed.

Big guy. Sandpapery skin. Square hair. Has a mustache like an ingot melted into an arrowhead. Reads movie magazines when he's not ordering purges. Surrounded by boot-lickers. As the recipient of Joan's devotional letters as well as a photo of her, he invites her over. What he's interested in, however, isn't a five-year plan but a five-minute plan: after drinks, dinner and a movie, of course. He's not mad, he's madcap.

Writer-director Peter Duncan's vision of a steely dictator's entourage as a group of Graceland-style gofers is as funny as it is shocking, but he does even better with Old Bad Joe: The dictator (wittily played by F. Murray Abraham) is a corseted and bewigged horny toad like an old bosun's mate in town for a night of liberty. He's grumpy not because of the oceans of blood on his hands, but because he's trying to quit smoking. Possibly because Stalin was such an equal-opportunity mass murderer -- he killed without malice, prejudice or bigotry; he just, you know, killed everybody -- the movie's portrayal of him seems not quite as distasteful as it might be.

At any rate, Joan's tryst with No. 1 ends with two nearly simultaneous events: his death and her impregnation. To make matters more complex, the Australian secret agent "Nine" (ever-dependable Sam Neill), on station that night in his identity as a KGB colonel, also shares Joan's Kremlin bed. So the ensuing child may be descended from either a monster or a spy.

If the movie drifts for a bit after it leaves its crenulated Graceland, its stooges and seducers, it does eventually settle back on course, as it follows a variation of the old demon-seed azimuth. Young Joe, programmed by the ardent, humorless Joan to represent socialist perfection, learns of his parentage and this changes him.

Joe, played brilliantly by Richard Roxburgh, feels his father's blood coursing in his veins. The movie cleverly watches him move efficiently toward power by any means possible -- not grandiosely, but after the fashion of the old man: He understands that power lies in party machinery, and manages stealthily to nearly take over Australia by taking command first of the prison guard union (he likes prisons) and then of law enforcement union (he likes cops -- he even marries one!).

Roxburgh is so good because he doesn't do Junior Stalin in the way that a Billy Crystal would: It's subtler than an impersonation, more of a suggestion. The mustache is there, but it's more in his steely eyes and his utter implacability. But the difference between this Stalin and the old one isn't the totalitarian psyche so much as something outside the gene pool: It's the obnoxious media, merrily corrupting every single impulse, inviting every true believer to sell out for money or celebrityhood, as if there were no more causes, only book deals.

The movie, in the end, becomes a bitter but comic media satire, as Joe's totalitarian moves are thwarted not merely by his mum's still fiery radicalism -- the movie's chief irony is that she learns the truth about Stalin through her son -- but also by the ever-ready presence of cameras and agents. In fact, by the presence of the very film itself; with a postmodernist fandango, the end of the movie we are watching becomes the movie that started up an hour and 40 minutes earlier.

"Children of the Revolution" is rich in ideas, some of them even good, all of them melancholy. The press, it says, as corrupt and as heartless and as self-important as it has become, is nevertheless the White Army that stands against the new Joes and their old ambitions.

Children of the Revolution is rated R for sexually graphic interludes.