I do understand that any film director has an own vision, but o my God!!!, this is an example of "misunderstanding" of Pushkin's poetry! First of all, the music used in the movie has nothing to do with Pushkin's time (XVIII-XIX century). Olga's song (Oh the Viburnum Blooms) is a very popular Soviet song written in 1949. The main theme of the movie is an interpretation of "On The Hills Of Manchuria" written in 1906 to memory of those who died during war with Japan, updated with gypsy guitar in this movie. Pushkin died in 1837, there is no way the movie's music corresponds to the Russian XVIII-XIX century culture or the poem's characters. Secondly, the most important elements of the poem like Tatiana's letter to Onegin, for example, are washed out of the movie. Tatiana is a 17-years old girl in love, the all her passion is in that letter!!! Then, why this movie is so dark? If authors thought about the poem as a tragedy (I associate the darkness with tragedy), then Tatiana shouldn't had to be married to such a handsome fellow like Martin Donovan in the movie. Based on the book,her husband was old and badly injured during a war. I stop criticizing the movie here, as there are different opinions and some of them a quite positive.

The 1999 cinematic production Onegin left this viewer as moved and distraught as the 'superfluous man.' Although certain social observances, such as 'the duel,' or marriage as an intractable institution, are without equivalents in our society, I believe Onegin's dilemma is identifiable. He is molded by the times and St. Petersburg's decadent society of nobles, but he is also alienated by it. He stands in observation of its faults and of his own. The story finds the character uncompliant but not rebellious. He is without outlet, or his own definition of nobility.The figure of Olga's French tutor assails Onegin for acknowledgement, but Onegin, in his clever way, dispatches this symbol of the Russian Gallomania. The Onegin character displays the uncanny ability to see through society's contrivances—even if he arrives at no definite conclusions. At the same dinner conversation he submits his sentiment that no man should own another in active defiance of the nobility's hold over the serfs. This audacious statement brings him closer to his would-be love, Tatayana, who looks on in admiration.She bears her heart to him, an offer he refuses. His explanation that marriage holds only disappointment seems to highlight his particular reaction to social norms. While he enjoys the freedom of nobility as well as explicit decadence, he broods on the critique of a society engaged in its own disgrace. His response to cynical nobility is alienation. His answer to the squalid institution of marriage is debauchery. And for these shortcomings he, himself, seems doubly jaded. He faces Tatayana as an apologist, and he seems embarrassed. After all, her offer of marriage is an opportunity to engender a true nobility of mind and spirit. Pleasure-seeking, and intellectualization are a vain reaction to what appears to be a cold and aggressive world. Tatayana exposes him in this respect. On the other hand, he has earned her love through his own keeping and defiance achieved through isolation. Onegin invites destruction on both himself and Tatayana in pursuit of this love. Viewers find him beseeching her in a room of marble, her royal husband asleep upstairs. Finally, she admits to him her continued love, which has not been destroyed, even by his neglect and the harshness of society. This admission is both a victory and a wretched fate.It is preferable to the fate he invites. His gesture promises to ruin Tatayana's honor as well as his own. For Onegin, the moment is a test of the conviction of love. He, therefore, marches directly to Tatayana where she sits reading in her husband's mansion to profess his love and defy institution at all cost. She turns him away forever to avoid total ruin.This fate is the fate of the 'superfluous man,' of the Russian who grapples with questions of self and places his will at odds with the forces of nature and society. The principle pathos of the film is the search for answers to those "accursed questions" which elude Onegin in the city and through the country landscape. Viewers peer through his windswept heart ultimately to dicover Pushkin's heroine, Tatyana, who like those answers, shall remain untouchable in the house of Nobility.

I haven't read Pushkin. However, I can imagine that this film is a faithful adaptation of the narrative, if nothing else. It is a film entirely at the service of telling the story around which the atmospherics - the romance - of rejected and lost love is fitted. On the face of it this doesn't sound like a problem. The experience of watching the film is one of odd gear shifting: narrative advance; pause to brood; narrative again, and so on. There's a sense of going through the motions, of professionalism. It's as if the players had been dropped into their characters, told the plan and faithfully carried it out. The only real exception to this is Liv Tyler, who manages all the facets of Tatyana with emotional homogeneity. Everyone else is studied. Fiennes is intense as Onegin but not particularly convincing. This, I'm afraid strikes me as a role - indeed, an entire project - predicated on the success of his brooding, conflicted aristocrat in Minghella's English Patient. I suspect a different director, such as Minghella, would have changed that relationship with the role. Indeed a better director might have insisted on a better script in order to assume the burden of storytelling properly and allow the actors to get on with their job. 5/10

Only people with a British/American mind who never read Onegin in the original version can enjoy this. The movie is made in a British way, things that are being displayed in the film are more suitable for England, not Russia. Not to talk about the awful Russian music. The music is good and pretty well known in Russia, but... this was composed in the middle of the 20th century (some of it was used before as soundtracks to cult Russian films) definitely unsuitable for the time Onegin lived in.Nevertheless, most of the world would think it's good movie, and it is. But the Russians would find it quite laughable and wrong. Hence this movie isn't REALLY good.Fiennes and Tyler are casted well.