Following a not-so-grand moviemaking tradition, screenwriter Peter Berry and director Marleen Gorris pretend to adapt a well-regarded piece of literature and produce a film that not only bears a merely passing resemblance to that piece of literature but, in fact, winds up opposed to the very thing that the source material represents. The Luzhin Defence takes its story line from an early Vladimir Nabokov novel (known here in translation as The Defense); the book is a remarkable portrayal of obsession and eventual madness, told through the eyes of a chess grand master who becomes increasingly unglued as he prepares to face a formidable nemesis. The movie, on the other hand, is about how the chess player's girlfriend puts up with him, more or less. Not quite the same thing, really. Nice for Emily Watson, who plays the girlfriend with generous wit and empathy. Understandable, perhaps, for Gorris, whose prior films, which include Mrs. Dalloway and Antonia's Line, showcase what are generally referred to as strong female characters. But not so great for John Turturro as Luzhin: Seeming without a clue as to how to portray a shambling, disheveled prodigy whose whole existence plays out on an interior chessboard, he comes off half the time like Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein. Not a bad performance, that, but those mannerisms aren't things you generally associate with chess players.

Adding insult to injury, Berry and Gorris give Nabokov's tragicomedy a kind of triumphant ending—just as Barry Levinson and Robert Redford did in their bald-faced betrayal of Bernard Malamud's The Natural. But Levinson and Redford had legitimately venal motives for their mutilation of Malamud's vision: They were making a commercial movie and couldn't risk bumming out their audience, most of which was probably unfamiliar with the source material anyway. The Luzhin Defence is an art-house picture, and one has to assume that Sony Pictures Classics hopes to attract Nabokov-philes to theaters. And, boy, will they be pissed. No director, not even Stanley Kubrick with Lolita, has managed to make a truly Nabokovian film out of a Nabokov novel, so I didn't go into Luzhin with high hopes that Gorris would pull a butterfly out of her hat. But I at least hoped she would fail in good faith.