Fifteen years ago the British director Bernard Rose made a deeply disappointing version of Anna Karenina in Russia. As if to make up for this he's spent much of this century in the States making low-budget movies transposing shorter Tolstoy works to present-day California. The first was ivans xtc, an acrid tale of Hollywood based on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the second part of The Kreutzer Sonata that centres on a pathologically jealous Beverly Hills philanthropist suspecting his wife of adultery. The third is Boxing Day, a version of Master and Man, the story of Vasily, a pompous, penny-pinching smalltown landowner, who sets out right after the December St Nicholas Day festival to buy some cut-price timber from a neighbouring landowner, taking with him Nikita, a heavy-drinking peasant with a troubled marriage. They get lost in a snowstorm and Vasily discovers how much less significant social hierarchies and money are compared to human relationships. Many regard the story as one of Tolstoy's most perfect, and Rose follows it with considerable fidelity.
Danny Huston takes the lead in all three pictures. In Boxing Day he's Basil, a desperate businessman who leaves his family in sunny Los Angeles at Christmas to make a quick killing buying and selling foreclosed properties around snow-covered Denver, Colorado. His unscrupulous charm is chillingly revealing when he cons an old lady into giving him the pin number of the church fund she administers. His false sense of superiority emerges when he insists that Nick (Matthew Jacobs), the alcoholic English chauffeur he hires in Denver, must call him "Sir". Rose, who wrote, directed and edited the film, skilfully charts the uneasy relationship between the two men, both losers in their own way, as they visit the abandoned properties Basil has on his list.
Gradually they lose their way as night draws in, the limousine's satnav fails and the snow steadily falls. It's a nuanced story, cleverly combining claustrophobia and agoraphobia, and the moving climax takes on a sonorous spiritual tone of revelation and redemption. Apparently longtime friends, Huston and Jacobs work superbly together, improvising much of their dialogue.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/23/boxing-day-review-danny-huston
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