No shocker that Leviathan is one of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. The movie is ambitious and serious and takes on issues of society, all ingredients for nominee status. The surprise is that Russia officially submitted it to the Oscar committee in the first place (each country gets to choose a single title for consideration). That act is not quite at the level of Kim Jong-un sponsoring free screenings of The Interview at the Pyongyang 12-plex, but clearly somebody in Moscow messed up: Leviathan is a furious portrait of Russian bureaucracy at its most corrupt.
At the core of the plot is a simple land-grab, but the implications are far-reaching. Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a rough handyman who’s managed to carve out a livelihood on the seafront near Murmansk. His house sits on a rocky piece of oceanfront property that is being claimed by the town’s crooked mayor, who arranges for Kolya to get a tiny fraction of what the land is actually worth in exchange for the place. Kolya’s old Army friend Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), now a lawyer, has just arrived from Moscow to help in the case; his big-city sophistication is in stark contrast to Kolya’s country ways, a fact that Kolya’s wife (Elena Liadova) notices. As we sink into the situation, every strand of life is revealed to be rigged. The shady mayor is blatant in his greed, and the legal system is a comically wordy charade. (A fast-talking judge who spews gobbledygook for minutes on end is straight out of a Dickens novel.) The church provides cover for the politicians, assuring the population that their reward for enduring all this unfairness will come in the afterlife.
Leviathan is a much bigger bowl of borscht than director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s previous films The Return and Elena, which established him as an important voice. The new movie’s sheer heft makes it fascinating—it might be unwieldy at times, and weighed down by a Russian ponderousness, but you never lose the exciting sense that you’re watching a filmmaker go for broke. Some well-chosen Philip Glass music adds to the mood, and repeated shots of the stormy sea crashing against the rugged coastline give the sense that nature is just waiting around for all this petty human nonsense to eventually subside. The film’s success has brought Vladimir Putin’s minions, Russian nationalists, and religious authorities out in force to condemn it as “evil,” “a cynical and dirty parody,” and “a cinematic anti-Putin manifesto.” In other words, it needs to be seen.
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LEVIATHAN Opens Fri., Feb. 13 at Guild 45th. Rated R. 141 minutes.
