Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
Directed By: Jerzy Skolimowski
Written By: Jerzy Skolimowski
Starring: Jeremy Iron
For Fans Of: Inscrutable DSA meetings
Thing I Find Funny: Seeing Jeremey Irons without an ascot
In the early 1980s, Nowak (Irons) arrives in London from Poland, leading a crew of three other workers who don’t speak the language. In their native country, the Solidarity union is striking. About one third of Poland’s workers – and almost four fifths of government workers – belong to Solidarity, and their organizing would eventually lead to the fall of the authoritarian government and the first free elections by the end of the 1980s.
Nowak and his crew are not part of Solidarity. They are working, illegally, to renovate a house in London for a mysterious government officer. The alienation and paranoia they experience is contrasted against the social change of their native Poland, where strikes are being forcefully broken by the military and the Solidarity union members face prison time and death.
Nowak conceals the true nature of the job from his work crew, leaving detailed notes for their boss in English as they accomplish the project for a quarter of what a local British crew would charge. This dual alienation – at once, apart from his country and also unable to confide in his fellow countryman – eats at Nowak. Skolimowski highlights this sense of isolation and otherness with a rich muted color palette and a subdued performance from Irons. As Nowak, Irons gives the character almost a child’s sense of failing to understand the world around him. This is a man in full, a leader of a work crew with a wife back in Warsaw, but he is unable to understand the customs and mores of his London neighbors. Skolimowski and his cinematographer really highlight the supernatural beauty of Irons’s face and eyes and they wring a lot of pathos out of this towering immigrant in Communist Bloc fashion.
The dedication to character and creating an atmosphere of anxiety and detachment sets this apart from your typical docudrama that spotlights a recent historical event. An understanding of Polish labor history is not necessary to enjoying the film on its own merits, and the film never overdoes it on the expository table setting. Instead, Skolimowski asks you to empathize with this poor scab, absent from wife and country as coups and war threaten his home. Another highlight is the score by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer, a droning electric thrum that sounds like something Adam Curtis would repurpose. This early effort from Zimmer – credited here as the electronic music composer – heightens the anxiety and mounting paranoia as phone lines in Warsaw are cut and it becomes harder and harder for Nowak to communicate with his boss and wife. What will be left of their home when they return? Will they even recognize it?
The dramatic irony – which Skolimowski wisely keeps as subtext – is that worker solidarity is the only defense labor has against oppressive and dangerous conditions. Over the course of the film, Nowak becomes an imperious dictator of this poor crew, recreating the very conditions they intended to escape. He tears down Solidarity posters in the London streets. He conceals the violence and destruction in Poland to his crew and lies to them under the paternalistic pretext of “protection.” The magic trick of Moonlighting is that the viewer is being asked to hold all of these conflicting views of Nowak at once. He’s a scab, a tyrant, a liar, a thief. But he knows no other way; he lacks the capacity to imagine a better world.
