Leviathan: Movie Review

“Leviathan” reverberates in western Judeo-Christian canon first in Job, then in John Hobbes’ early enlightenment tome. The 2014 Russian eponymous movie allows for either connection. Near its end, the Old Testament story is explicitly referenced. But for the first two hours of this slow but watchable tale, the heavy hand of authority is given top billing.

Russia is a vast land, and its reach is felt even though the story never leaves a small cove in the northern coast – possibly somewhere near Archangel, on the White Sea or the Kola peninsula? In any event, hovering around the Arctic Circle. Days are cool but filled with endless twilight. The land is barren, sedge and rock surrounding forbidding waters.

Kolya has lived on a choice waterfront plat, his rambling house a mix of paint-peeling clapboard and single-pane dirty glass. To one side sits his mechanic’s shed, where he repairs cars, trucks, whatever neighbors leave with him. Sharing the home are Lilya, his second wife, and Roma, son of his first marriage. Roma, an early teen, has problems accepting the newer, younger mother, and ritually resists his father’s attempts to guide him forward to manhood.

All that is background to their main dilemma. Mer, the small town mayor, has persuaded the local courts to “condemn” the property so that he can deed it to a rich outsider, lining his pockets in the transfer. Kolya naturally resists, and has an ace in his pocket – Dima, Dmitry, a handsome Moscow lawyer who is either a friend of Kolya’s youth, or his long-lost brother. Dima, looking like a cross between Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner, seems to Lilya to be sent from heaven. Not only does he have the goods on Mer – some shady dealing in the past with a man named Kostrov, which strikes fear in the pol’s face – but also a fresh face and body in their backwater burg.

Out of this set of entanglements, a tragic tale unfolds, with honesty and pathos and lots of vodka. The drinking is not condemned, rather it is expected, and just as much a part of the scenery as the dreary half-day, half-night light. In the end, the tribulations of Job are nothing as compared to what Kolya goes through.

Despite the somber tone of the tale, director Andrey Zvyagintsev keeps a constant pull on the flow. Lacking much of the slick production value of a Hollywood film – static camera angles, totally natural lighting, little music, long shots, short on explication – he is able to let the story tell itself, the characters speak for themselves. And he certainly nudges at the country, its self-image and history. In a key scene near the middle of the movie, the four principles are off in the “country” (another desolate seascape) shooting at bottles. A friend, the chief of the local traffic police, pulls out his rifle, an AK-47, and, instead of hitting just one bottle as the others have, blasts them all to shards with one burst. “Now what are we going to do for targets” a drunken Kolya slurs. The chief grins and pulls out a series of photographs of all the Soviet leaders, Lenin through Gorbachev. “What, nothing more recent?” Kolya asks, echoing the portrait of Putin we see grimly placed above the mayors shoulder every time he connives with his staff. “No, it’s best we let them ripen a bit more.”

2014 Oscar Nominee for Best Foreign Film.

8.4/10 rating

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