[6]

Sidney Lumet directs this fictionalized account of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple who were accused of being Soviet spies and executed in the midst of 1950s’ McCarthyism hysteria. Lumet cuts back and forth in time throughout the movie, balancing flashbacks with Julius and Ethel, played by Mandy Patinkin and Lindsay Crouse, with the story of their children ten or fifteen years after the executions.

Timothy Hutton and Amanda Plummer play the children as young adults. She is a distraught political activist who, haunted by what happened to their parents, attempts suicide. Hutton’s character is affected by his sister’s pain enough to dig into the past to find out what really happened. Were his parents Soviet spies, or were they murdered by the government?

I love Sidney Lumet’s unsentimental handling of the material and the entire cast does a fine job. But I think maybe the storytelling is a little too ambitious for a two-hour movie. I’d like to have seen more time spent with Hutton and Plummer’s characters, and if the Rosenbergs were innocent, maybe they could have been more likeable characters? Julius is so single-minded, he comes off like Rain Man sometimes, and Ethel comes off as more of an ice queen than a mother. Maybe it was part of Lumet’s goal to complicate our identification with the characters — maybe he wanted to leave some doubt as to what they were capable of?

While I didn’t quite connect with Daniel as much as I’d hoped, I’m willing to believe it might be one of those films I appreciate more on a second viewing.

With Ed Asner and Ellen Barkin.

Lindsay Crose plays Ethel Rosenberg, here just moments before her execution.