Review

Leviathan

Troubled teen Roman (Sergey Pokhodaev) ponders the bones of a whale in the Russian epic Leviathan.
Troubled teen Roman (Sergey Pokhodaev) ponders the bones of a whale in the Russian epic Leviathan.

Sober and deliberate, with the gray force of inevitability, Andrey Zvyagintsev's remarkably well-wrought Leviathan is a compelling drama set in contemporary Russia about a car mechanic who has built -- apparently by himself -- a ramshackle house on a spit of waterfront land somewhere in the country's northwestern interior. It is a beautiful spot, coveted by the corrupt mayor Vadim (a remarkable performance by Roman Madyanov, an actor I've never seen before but whom I'll never forget), who uses the Russian equivalent of eminent domain -- the power of the state to take private property for public use -- to compel the owner to sell.

Our mechanic, Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov), doesn't want to sell, especially not for the pittance the mayor is offering. So he enlists the services of his army buddy Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), now an up-and-coming lawyer in Moscow, who has the connections one needs to fight city hall. Dmitriy arrives with a fat file full of evidence of Vadim's corruption. But before too long, Dmitriy is revealed as something less than the white knight he first appears to be.

Leviathan

91 Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev

Cast: Aleksey Serebryakov, Roman Madyanov, Elena Lyadova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov

Rating: R, for language and some sexuality/graphic nudity

Running time: 140 minutes

Kolya, it seems, is a man of complicated fortune. In addition to his beautiful piece of land, he has a beautiful second wife, Lilya (Elena Lyadova), who isn't entirely happy with living on the Kola Peninsula, on the brink of the wilderness, while working a drudge job in a fish factory. From his first marriage, Kolya has a troubled teenage son, Roman (Sergey Pokhodaev), who seems bent on following his father into the sort of desperate alcoholism and tribalism that defines Kolya's worldview. He's an ugly piece of work, and the great windows that afford him a spectacular view of the inlet and the village beyond also suggest a certain vulnerability. If people in glass houses oughtn't fling stones, then what should we expect to happen to a bomb-thrower like Kolya?

The irony is that Leviathan was actually made with funds supplied by the Russian government, by bureaucrats who either didn't bother to read the script or were so insensible that they failed to recognize Zvyagintsev's stinging critique. This is a world ruled by the drunken and aggressive, where the facts of the case are details to be speed-read into the record and ideologies are just excuses for abuse. A portrait of Putin hangs appropriately in Vadim's office; to omit it would remove the film from the realm of realism, but we understand what the censors must have missed. There is a patron saint of corruption, and Russia is run by gangsters and priests, and the most important scenes are played off-camera, in secret untouchable rooms.

In one critical scene, Kolya and his buddies drink gallons of vodka before setting up a makeshift shooting range, where they fire their rifles (one brings an old army-issue Kalashnikov) at photos of Brezhnev and Gorbachev. They spare Boris Yeltsin ("the boozy conductor") the indignity of being shot to pieces because he was more an accidental leader, a fellow traveler in the haphazard universe. "Got any more modern targets?" Kolya asks, and the police officer who has brought them cagily replies that he's waiting for some "historical perspective."

It's giving nothing away to say Leviathan is a tragedy (the title itself is an allusion to Thomas Hobbes' classic work about the necessity of the individual to cede some autonomy to the state in order to facilitate society), though its bleakness is relieved by a few moments of comedy and the stark, sensual beauty of Mikhail Krichman's cinematography, which sets the turbulent, provisional scramblings of men against the sublime majesty of the landscape. Here the light seems flat and hard, the rain looks like falling pebbles, and the bleached carcass of a beached whale mocks the futility of the nasty, brutish and short lives of the residents.

Leviathan starts out on a reasonably human scale, as a domestic drama about an ordinary man trying to hold on to what his luck has brought him. It ends up an epic, a movie with biblical ambitions, a haunting story about a modern Job.

MovieStyle on 03/20/2015

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