This article contains spoilers for Vladimir.
Vladimir, a delightful novel by Julia May Jonas about a 58-year-old professor who becomes obsessed with a younger colleague as her husband faces discipline for past affairs with his undergraduate students, boasts certain elements that make it an obvious candidate for adaptation on Netflix. The older woman/younger man plot is popular of late—see Babygirl, The Idea of You, A Family Affair. So are dramas about #MeToo’d mentors, and even if After the Hunt was something of a failure, Tár was not. Vladimir is ultimately a story about an open marriage, the affairs each spouse undertook over decades, and a prospective affair that the book’s unnamed wife and narrator is hoping to enter into. On the face of it, it’s spicy, and the narrator has a tart, specific way of looking at the world, as when she describes herself as “an oldish white woman in her late fifties (the identity I am burdened with publicly presenting, to my general embarrassment).”
All of this could add up to something sharp and enjoyable to watch. So it comes as a surprising disappointment that the adaptation, a newly released eight-episode miniseries created by the book’s author and starring Rachel Weisz as the narrator (here given the initial “M.”), Leo Woodall (The White Lotus) as the eponymous Vladimir, and John Slattery (Mad Men) as the narrator’s husband John, is a pretty husk of the novel that made every year-end best-of list back in 2022. Can Netflix make a show about an older woman’s sudden lust that is sexy, thoughtful, and literary, the way Vladimir the book is? The answer, I’m afraid, is no.
The first problem is that Weisz, at 55, is simply too pretty for this. The show’s writers have written her well-preserved look, far more fitting for an actress than a professor, into the story. When M. is meeting with the similarly aged wife of the college president, her peer seethes with jealousy, asking her, “What are you doing to your face?” But the novel’s narrator is absolutely fixated on her own body, with the astuteness of somebody who understands how ridiculous she’s being, but cannot stop. Looking in the mirror, assessing herself critically, the narrator notes “the webbing around my eyes, my frowning jowls, and the shriveled space between my clavicles”—none of these being problems that, to the viewer’s sharp eye, afflicted Weisz at the time of filming.
“I felt desperation at the idea that I would never captivate anyone ever again,” the narrator thinks in the book. “A man might make a concession for me based on mutual agreeability, shared crinkliness, but he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, be in my thrall.” Her crush on Vladimir, a handsome fortysomething novelist with a weightlifting hobby whose last well-reviewed book has endowed him with a certain amount of literary heat, emerges from her attraction to his body, but also from her desperate feeling like this is a last chance to prove something to herself about her sexual relevance. While the show adapts these thoughts into a wry little direct-to-camera speech at the beginning of Episode 1, it makes no sense here: In what universe has Rachel Weisz “lost the ability to captivate”? Given this beautiful face, the character’s insecurity around aging has to take on a different meaning—one the show can’t quite decide upon, so it’s lost.
The book’s narrator is an English professor whose last novel, published 15 years ago, was quietly received. Although she denigrates her own abilities as a writer (her assessment of her own career is utterly ruthless: “My work was simply not enough—not loud enough, not enough, not realistic enough, not poetic enough, not funny enough, not speculative enough, not good enough”), a love for literature and writerly interest in the vicissitudes of human experience are built into her character. When she worries that if she divorces her husband, her social status will fall, even with her own adult daughter—”I would be tolerated as long as it was clear I appreciated the cots, the sofa beds, the small bedrooms. I would have to demonstrate gratitude for the scraps and crumbs of time, attention, money, and luxury that came my way. I would work for it, with early mornings watching the baby, or nights doing dishes after everyone fell asleep”—it’s a sharp social observation, and not one that has anything to do with her crush on Vladimir, except insofar as most concerns in the narrator’s mind are about getting old. None of this truly sad stuff is in the show, which favors, instead, far smaller and more instantly parseable intergenerational observations, like one about how annoying it is that everyone in and around this college town now says “You’re fine” instead of “No worries.”
In response to the former, M. asks the camera: “Am I?” Yes, the show uses direct address, with M. often breaking the fourth wall and speaking to the audience, à la Fleabag. Jonas said to Netflix that this was “a way to make external … internalizations,” of which there are so many in the novel. But, adapted for Netflix, these become little more than small gestures toward the voice of the narrator, who, in the book, is the kind of person who would spin out speculation on the tone of one of Vladimir’s text messages into a full page of overthinking, considering the ramifications of each word. This page, in the show, is boiled down to a brief one-liner. Who is the unnamed narrator? A hyperintelligent woman, applying all of her analytic power to the multiple emotional crises she finds herself navigating. Who is M.? A sassy, hot professor on the make.
One tension of the novel lies in the uncertainty over whether Vladimir has any sexual interest in the narrator. They do, eventually, have sex, but only after she drugs him and ties him up at her lake cabin, forcing their proximity, and spins a partial (perhaps unintentional) lie about his own wife’s infidelity. The sex (in both show and book) is a good experience for the narrator and M., but narratively unsatisfying; it happens just the once. And it’s here that the two endings diverge in a way that explains a lot about why the adaptation just doesn’t work.
In the novel, after Vladimir and the narrator have sex, her husband arrives, and that’s the end of that dalliance. The narrator goes to bed with John. Vladimir goes out on the lake to kayak, then sees the cabin go up in flames, a fire caused by the space heaters the group left on. He rescues the narrator and John, who each sustain significant burns requiring months of rehabilitation (and accelerating the narrator’s feeling that her time as an attractive person is over). Vladimir writes a novel about a younger man and an older woman, the latter of whom dies in a fire; that character is outfitted with “many descriptions, similes, and metaphors that concern the loosening quality of her skin”—a final confirmation to the narrator, if we needed one, that Vladimir noticed her age, and not in a flattering way. The narrator loses her own draft of a new novel in the fire. She starts another one, about a lady pirate. She speaks with one of the students her husband had an affair with, and seems to finally understand why what he did was harmful. Using settlement money from the space heater company, the narrator and John move to New York City and mostly retire from the college. In a somewhat less bitter callback to that passage about cots and sofas, they become caregivers for their grandchild—and they enjoy it.
The show’s ending is far more flattering to M. “Did I make it all up?” M. asks Vladimir, second-guessing her understanding of their attraction, and he confesses that he’d fantasized about her at the exact times that M. had had flashes of erotic reverie starring him (at a faculty meeting, at her house, in her pool). The younger man propositions her for a continual arrangement, asking if they can meet at the cabin once a week, cupping her breast and saying, “You inspire me.” Her husband arrives at the cabin, the three talk, and then sleep. When the fire breaks out, the three of them spring up and try to escape the house. M. chooses to brave the fire to rescue some legal pads she’s been using to write a new novel, rather than stay with the two men and try to open a stuck door to the outside. We see her outside the house, describing the later success of her novel about a woman’s obsession with a younger colleague. You’re left wondering how the men could have gotten out, when, winking at us, M. says: “Don’t worry, I call 911, everyone gets out … You don’t believe me?” That’s the last line of the show, leaving open a significant chance that M. may—as befits a woman who drugs and ties up the man she’s obsessed with—be a teensy, tiny bit of a sociopath.
Some reviewers of the novel found the narrator insufficiently mean—”she’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” said the New York Times—and the book’s ending overly punitive toward the #MeToo’d professor and his finally faithful wife, who end up meek, partnered grandparents after living a transgressive life. Perhaps the show’s ending, in which M. seems to get away with everything—the affection of her husband, Vladimir’s lust, her novel, and her freedom—was a rewrite intended to fix this problem. “I want choices, I want options … The kids call it agency,” M. says to her husband. The show’s episodes are each named after works of literature or criticism—“We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” “Play It As It Lays,” and so forth. The final episode, with this new conclusion for M., is “Against Interpretation.” It’s a choice that seems to push the viewer away, asking us not to overthink it. For readers of the book, it’s far too late for that.