Pan Tadeusz -or- What am I supposed to be learning about Lithuania from this?

I am familiar with many forms of storytelling. I am also good at understanding and following along with most movies. That said, when this film ended I said to my tv, "What the heck was that?"

The film/book "Pan Tadeusz" (1999) was on a recommended reading list for getting acquainted with Lithuania. My guess is that in this adaptation from the book, they tried to cram in too many plot points and it ended up incredibly disjointed for most of the film. It began with an assumption of my generous background in Polish/Lithuanian history during the early 1800s.

They assumed wrong.

Once I generally figured out the Polish-Lithuanian co-state/non-state sort of relationship, and sort of figured out who belonged to whom in the sparring family storyline, I still couldn't quite figure out why things were happening. I knew what was happening, but couldn't figure out why any one scene related to the next many times, especially for the first hour and a half.

"Hey, let's have a war, with each other and with some Russians." "Okay!" bam! bam! bam! "Wait, we killed lots of each other? Okay, no biggie. We're nobility. Moving on..." Still, it never bothered me that the Russians were sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes locals, sometimes foreigners. Ambiguity with the Russians isn't so shocking a concept.

I could get that the film was trying to capture the style of the time in which it was written and affectations of speech. There were grand speeches and men talking to one another in sweeping metaphors that made more sense when I found out this was not based on a novel, but a Polish epic poem. Written in twelve volumes. Oy.

So what did I learn about Lithuania and/or Lithuania-Poland?

Lots of nature. Lots of mustaches.

(But I never figured out why the title, which translates to Mr. Thaddeus, was the title. Tadeusz was in about 15% of the film and not a particularly pivotal 15%, at that. Maybe it all makes more sense when read in 19th century Polish. Let's hope.)