Moscow on the Hudson: Assimilation Nation

"I have a defector between Estee Lauder and Pierre Cardin!"

Lately, I’ve been watching the show “Shrinking” on Apple TV. If you aren’t familiar with it, the show stars Jason Segel of “How I Met Your Mother” fame (or, if you prefer, like I do, Forgetting Sarah Marshall fame) as a Southern California therapist who practices unusual methods all while dealing with the trauma stemming from his wife’s death. It’s in its third season.

Here’s the thing. I sort of hate it. More than that, I often loathe it. To me, the show represents everything I dislike about modern comedy. It’s less about humor and more about vibes. “Seinfeld” was famously governed by a “no hugging, no learning” edict. Well, “Shrinking” is its polar opposite. Sometimes, it seems to be a show all about hugging, learning, crying and hanging out. The characters talk about their hangups so much, you wonder how they get anything done. Often, the comedy, such as it is, is almost on the level of what I call insurance-ad funny. You know, those ads by Geico or Progressive that engage in a kind of gentle, no-laugh humor that makes the Family Circus seem like a Lenny Bruce routine.

I watch the show for only one reason: Harrison Ford. He plays a therapist who is a mentor to Segel’s character and manages at turns to be gruff, sardonic, empathetic, supportive and, at the end of the day, quite wise. Sort of a Yoda, if you want to get all ironic about it. At 83, after a first-ballot-Hall-of-Fame career, Ford is doing some of his best work, which on its own should be some inspiration to all of us.

This season has seen the show import another legendary vet: Michael J. Fox, who plays a Parkinson’s patient not unlike himself. Watching Ford and Fox together onscreen was more than a nostalgic exercise for me. It was a reminder to me how even the greats pass into history, sometimes far more quickly than we expect.

There was a time when both were undisputed box-office titans. Their movies raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. Both headed up film franchises that remain today among the most beloved in Hollywood history. In a constellation of stars during the 1980s, they, along with some others such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Streep, blazed the brightest. Illness largely robbed Fox of his ability to work while Ford is now on the downslope of a 50-year run.

Do you know where I am going with this? Good. Because I’m not sure myself. No – all of this was on my mind as I spooled up 1984’s Moscow on the Hudson, starring the redoubtable Robin Williams.

The farther away we get from Williams’ greatness, the easier it has become to forget him entirely. (He took his own life in 2014.) It’s difficult to relate the impact with which Williams emerged in the late 1970s, when he landed (or created, really) the role of Mork from Ork, the wacky alien who first appeared on the sitcom “Happy Days.” No one had ever seen anything like Robin Williams, whose improvisational mind seemed to move at warp speed. He could do physical comedy, celebrity impressions and extended riffs. He could fashion characters out of thin air. He was a stand-up genius. He was somehow bizarre and relatable at the same time, a maniac with a fragile heart.

The movies ultimately called, but his film career didn’t start in the way you might expect. He didn’t star in some Caddyshack-esque romp that served as a vehicle for his comedy. He was the lead in Robert Altman’s Popeye, a truly idiosyncratic piece of filmmaking and an epic disaster. Then he starred in The World According to Garp, playing against type as the titular character. The film was a modest success but certainly not a breakout.

It was clear that Williams was hungry to be taken seriously as an actor and performer and had no interest in conforming to the audience’s expectations. He refused – at least at the outset– to take the easy way out and play a familiar type. Moscow on the Hudson continued in that vein.

This is a movie that, for whatever reason, I had never seen. And in truth I had sort of written it off long ago as a sort of madcap Cold War comedy in which Williams does a bunch of culture-clash bits as a fish-out-of-water Russian in the United States. An extended Yakov Smirnoff schtick on the big screen.¹

Well, I was wrong. Dead wrong, in fact. And this is why you always should give movies a chance to surprise you. The best ones inevitably do.

Moscow on the Hudson, directed by Paul Mazursky, is a film of great heart but one with much on its mind. It is a celebration of the immigrant experience and a reminder that those who come to this country often carry a greater appreciation for its virtues than those who were born here. There is a deep, abiding love in this film for the promise of America along with an appreciation of how the constant influx of new voices and new cultures have kept this nation vibrant for much of its brief existence.

Williams indeed plays a Russian, but his performance is muted, sometimes to the point of impassivity. He is the engine of the story, but the humor lies mainly in how he reacts to the other characters around him. There are no “What’s the deal with hot dogs?” riffs. The film bravely starts in the Soviet Union and stubbornly stays there for most of the first act. Moreover, the Soviet characters, including Williams, speak Russian. Audiences had to be confused. They might have been expecting Mork Goes to Moscow and wound up in a Tarkovsky joint.²

Williams’ Vladimir at first glean seems to have few issues with his life, despite the fact that he must wait in long lines in the gloom and chill for basics such as shoes and toilet paper. He lives with his extended family in a cramped Moscovite flat and plays the saxophone at a Russian circus. As Soviet lives go, his isn’t that bad — surely not as bad as the Jewish protesters we see being hauled away by the secret police. Vladimir has accepted his lot. It’s his friend Anatoly, a clown at the circus, who hungers to leave, who longs for freedom. Vladimir may not even know what that word means.

When the two end up as part of a New York performance of the circus, Anatoly vows to defect while Vladimir views it as a dangerous gamble. Before the troupe leaves the country, it makes a stop by Bloomingdale’s for a quick shopping trip, one carefully watched over by party officials.

“My God, what decadence!” one of the KGB men exclaims as he views the seemingly endless assortment of consumer goods. Mazursky smartly populates the film with recognizable American brands of the moment: Gloria Vanderbilt, Jordache, New Balance, Tropicana, Chipwich. Even the Communist watchdogs are taken up in the moment, buying perfume and silk robes.

In a dressing room, Anatoly confesses that he doesn’t have the guts to go through it while Vladmir holds him tenderly. Minutes later, as Vladimir watches his troupe be herded back toward the bus (and back to Moscow), he makes a snap decision to defect himself, hiding behind a cosmetics counter and crawling through the aisles to avoid his Soviet handlers. Once the NYPD shows up, Vladimir announces his intention to remain in the U.S. At that point, the KGB men can’t touch him.

“This is New York City,” one cop says. “A man can do whatever he wants.”

Soon the local TV news shows up and the incident becomes a media event. And this is where the movie surprised me again. I was expecting a sequence containing the familiar Cold War trappings: Vladimir interrogated endlessly by the FBI, Soviet attempts to get him back, maybe a court hearing.

None of that happens. Instead, the Soviets appear to shrug and leave Vladimir alone to fend for himself despite his fears of being forced to return. Homeless and penniless, he is taken by the Bloomie’s security guard (Cleavant Derricks), a Black man who tells reporters he’s a “refugee from Alabama,” to his home in a run-down section of Harlem. His first trip to an American supermarket overwhelms him so much (no lines, so many choices) that he suffers a breakdown.

Soon, he begins to work a series of jobs familiar to most who have lived the American immigrant experience. He progresses from hauling dinner ware as a busboy at a Cuban restaurant to manning a counter at McDonald’s to driving a limo. He begins to date an Italian woman (Maria Conchita Alonso) who works at Bloomingdale’s and is studying for her citizenship exam.

As the film moves forward, you realize the totality of Mazursky’s vision: Virtually every character whom Vladimir encounters in New York is an immigrant themselves, striving to make a better life. His lawyer is a Cuban refugee who reached the U.S. on a raft, landing at the Fountainbleu hotel in Miami in one of the movie’s funniest moments. And the scene in which Alonso is sworn in as a citizen is stirring – the applicants of course all know U.S. history and civics far better than the natives.

Mazursky said he was inspired by his grandfather’s emigration from Eastern Europe to make the film – and it shows.³ This is a movie that knows its subject. In a way, it’s a traditional New York melting pot movie—but it also speaks to the tensions of the present day. Mazursky doesn’t paint Vladimir’s journey as an unbridled success story. In fact, he is deeply lonely and often frightened. Near the end of the film, he only appears to come completely alive when he travels to Brooklyn and finds a Russian enclave, where he dances and sings with his countrymen. But a subsequent mugging makes him question whether America really is worth the struggle.

“In Moscow we fought for an inch of freedom!” he tells his lawyer^{. “}Here you take it and pour shit all over it.”

Moscow on the Hudson was, like Garp, a limited success. Williams would not ascend to the cinema stratosphere until a few years later with Good Morning, Vietnam, a film that allowed him to fuse his improvisational gifts with his humanist streak. Then he went on a run that we’re all familiar with: Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, The Fisher King – all leading to Good Will Hunting, where he picked up an Oscar playing Matt Damon’s therapist. Williams was skilled at conveying a deep empathy along with a touch of sadness. His eyes were perhaps his greatest acting weapon. He learned to dial down his mannerism and lean deeply into his sensitivity.

But as most Hollywood careers go, things went a bit awry. His schtick began to wear thin – hits in which he played the motormouth version of himself such as Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire sometimes made him feel like a caricature. His films began to feel random, or even worse rote, as he oscillated between zany and “serious”: Hook, Flubber, Patch Adams, Jack, Jakob the Liar, Toys. Audiences were beginning to turn on him. He went full villain mode in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia. He was reduced to comic relief in the (execrable) Night at the Museum series. He seemed increasingly desperate for attention.

If you had mentioned Williams to me 20 years ago, I likely would have rolled my eyes. His star had faded, his brilliance dulled by a combination of familiarity and too many average films. But then he got sick and rather than live with it, he killed himself. By then, he had passed into “legendary” status, where he was more honored than employed.

But you can still find strains of his genius. In a scene in “Shrinking,” Ford out of nowhere goes “Fosse, Fosse, Fosse” while doing jazz hands. It’s never explained, but he was doing an impression of Williams in The Birdcage, Williams’ last great movie and one of his finest performances.

Sometimes our heroes let us down, but we can let them down too – by forgetting what made them what they are. I’m sorry, Robin. You gave us everything you could – and more than most ever have.

WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: I found Moscow on the Hudson for free on The ROKU Channel, but it’s rentable on various platforms.

HEY ISN’T THAT: Ilya Baskin, who plays the Russian circus clown, has had a long and fruitful career playing, you guessed it, Russians. He’s appeared in films such as Air Force One (with Harrison Ford) and TV shows such as Homeland and Madam Secretary. His most recent film credit was for Reagan in 2024.

ARMAGEDDON INDEX (0/10): Vladimir’s defection doesn’t even rise to the level of “international incident.”

DUST CLOUDS: The poster, which featured a New Yorker-style cover and typeface, was the subject of a successful copyright infringement lawsuit by by artist Saul Steinberg.

TOP OF THE POPS: The number-one song on the Billboard chart when the film was released in April 1984 “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins. Tell me again why the 80s weren’t awesome?

WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: The Pitt (S2, HBO), Shrinking (S3, Apple), For All Mankind (S5, Apple).

LAST ENTRY: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

NEXT ENTRY: Letters from a Dead Man (1986)

1. Yakov Smirnoff was a Russian-born comedian who developed a standup routine in the U.S. centered on life in the Soviet Union. "In Russia, if you say, 'Take my wife—please', you come home and she is gone,” a typical bit went. He has a small part in the movie. He was about as 1984 as you can get.

2. There is a brief preface to the Soviet section that shows Williams’ character giving advice on a New York City bus that seems to give away the movie. I have no doubt it was included to reassure audiences that the film would eventually feature English.

3. Mazursky had a terrific career as another product of the New Hollywood, one particularly adept at examining the American society of the moment. His films include: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Harry and Tonto and an Unmarried Woman. He helped write the pilot episode for The Monkees’ TV series and also played Norm, a golfer at Larry David’s club in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” who suffers a heart attack after Larry berates him in the classic episode “The Black Swan.”