Review: “Leviathan”

Country: Russia; Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev

B+/A/A+/A+ (Very solid main story leading to epic deeper and darker profundities upon further examination)

Noir films commonly base their plots on a person looking for the solution to a mystery, and having his tragic fate become finding it. Leave it to the Russians, then, to make the greatest existential noir film ever in “Leviathan”: a film that starts with the premise of “You Can’t Fight City Hall” and ends up devastatingly revealing to the audience just what “City Hall” really ends up meaning.

The film hints at its ultimate subject before showing what looks like a small-time conflict between a local man whose hand-built house by the water is threatened by a corrupt mayor. The situation and characters participating in it are first given a dark comic spin, from a judge who reads out a decision like it’s a farm auction to the jaw-dropping amounts of vodka consumed for nearly every occasion. And the film’s screenplay has a great confidence in leaving details and scenes out of the story, both trusting us to infer the connecting details, and several times delivering some insightful misdirections (in one scene, a character looks like he’s about to make a terrible decision – nope, it’s more vodka instead!)

But like ripples emanating from a tar pit, it soon becomes apparent that much more than a local conflict is going on. Both our main character’s side and the Mayor’s are shown as tied to larger, darker forces outside the main story, while limited in their outlook and resolve themselves. And the film’s worldview expands in response, showing how the conflict is a wave reflected in the community, local government, Russian society, and even tied to religion itself.

This is aided by some potent if somewhat direct symbolism in the film, including amazing uses of the Russian landscape. And if the indicators of the message are a little obvious, the message getting sent is incredibly powerful. Maybe the key to the movie is an otherwise throwaway moment in the middle where a character carries a large sack of food he’s thinking is going for charity but is used for feeding pigs instead. Because by the end of “Leviathan”, the audience experiences an ironic reversal of the ending of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”- now it’s the men looking into the window, seeing pigs and men together and becoming increasingly unable to tell the difference.