The Russian men of Leviathan are drunk and depressed. The rich and powerful seek to oppress them at every turn. The women are scarcely there except to offer refreshment. Got some tea? Got a bottle of water? Should we start on the kebabs? Of course, these pleasantries are a cover for an affair that seeks to rip this family apart. When they go on a camping trip, they drink in excess and shot bottles. When the bottles are all smashed, the targets are Soviet figures of the past. Zvyagintsev, to his credit, does reel it back by not allowing the current head of state's face to end up on that brick wall. That would have taken the already meandering social-political commentary to unbearable levels.

The bad guy is Mayor Vadim, who seeks to force out Kolya and acquire his land for his own developmental properties. What he is planning is not known, but it seems to be something grand and selfish. A mansion, Kolya theorises. A long winded court order lays out all the struggles in a matter of minutes, and condenses the plot like a Steig Larson novel. We are forced to find some sort of emotion in Aleksei Serebryakov's withered, anguished expression (which he does a good job of expressing). In the midst of the evil dealings, and his exasperation at these small town folk not bowing down to his will and vision, there is a scene with a priest that seemingly reeks of an attempt to humanise him. He talks pointedly with a priest as if it was a confession, and is asked about the status of his wife and kids like a pleasant bumping into a friend. Revisiting this scene after the final revelation, it has a different feel to it. They empower themselves with the word of God, and believe that what they are doing is right. They would never kill a man who was attempting to blackmail them, but they do just as much as that.

The Koyla family is afforded less complexity. The son has a problem with the step-mum, as domestic dramas go. There is an affair that does not seem particularly motivated (although Dmitri is a very strong character, and his contrasting actions of fighting tooth and nail for his friend's land while breaking up his marriage speak loudly - when Vadim questions how a prestigious lawyer could be presiding the case, he does not consider the loyalty and act of friendship). The long-winded runtime might suggest that something deeper is created, but much of it is swallowed up by legal talk and incidents that never seem to go their way. Koyla flares up at every opportunity, and this makes its impact even worse.

Serebryakov has a tendency to implicit suggest during moments of great tension. This is somewhat of a hit and miss. In some situations, it is very effective. As the affair is revealed, a young boy runs and yells of something seemingly more sinister. Then we linger on a secondary character, and let the burst fire of the gunshots tell us what has happened. This works because the off-the-hinge violence of Koyla has been previously established, and we can guess what would cause such an extreme reaction. And later, in the same vein, we know why Roma is running away from what he has seen in the basement, and we can link the rape to the suicide. In other cases, it chops up moments of extreme emotional reaction. We see Kolya's haggard body stumble to a halt over Lilya's corpse, but instead of letting Serebryakov react, it cuts away to his shattered face, an undetermined amount of time later. We are made to extrapolate his grief and his religious bargaining is a rather lame scene to make up for it.

This is Job through and through, but for the final reward. We have a somewhat nuanced depiction of the government and church coming together for their own mutual selfish cause, and trying to justify it. This is intriguing, but the common man's story suffers for it. Everything must go wrong for them. There is no judge in to accept their statement. There is no one authorised to adjudicate. Legal pleas, months of weary and desperate fighting, fly by in mere seconds and seems to beat and beat the man until the struggle is all out of him. It opens and closes with the same shots of landscape, the natural beauty and power, the way it has ravaged a ship in its cold indifference. I suppose it is trying to suggest the absence and carelessness of God, and how men take what they want in their own way. The almost complete silence in the soundtrack rings true. It is bleak without restraint.

"Leviathan" was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Because of this, I naturally had high expectations for this Russian movie. Sadly, it had a great set-up but the film just fizzled into nothing...

When the film begins, Kolya's life is a bit of a mess. The local crooked mayor, Vadim, has been fighting to take much of Kolya's property using the notion of eminent domain (an often abused government policy that takes land for public use and compensates the homeowner...with what the government thinks is a fair value for your property). However, Kolya's friend is a lawyer from Moscow and if they lose their appeal, he's going to try blackmailing the mayor into abandoning this venture. How? He has incriminating evidence about some of the mayor's illegal activities--MOB activities. Not necessarily a smart way to fight back, but this did set a nice stage for the film.

Unfortunately, following the lawyer's private meeting with the mayor, the film just went no where. The film claims to be inspired by the Book of Job. Horrible things happen again and again to Kolya--just like Job. HOWEVER, and this is important, in Job, eventually the horrible stuff ended and Job became prosperous once again. In this film, it just ended with Kolya going to prison and losing everything. What sort of finale is that?! And, between the lawyer meeting with the mayor and this awful ending, the film just limped along and was rather boring and directionless. Not an enjoyable viewing experience or one that seemed to have much meaning.

Whether you relate it more to Marvin Heemeyer or the story of Job, Andrey Zvyagintsev's "Leviafan" ("Leviathan" in English) is an impressive piece of work. It's probably a commonplace story, with the officials in an ignored city doing everything possible to serve themselves. It's the sort of movie that feels like a kick in the gut. Although the title physically refers to the whale skeleton, it can abstractly refer to the state's clout.

Although it's a long movie, it's still one that grips you. One gets the feeling that these people in these small towns see no future, and so they spend much of their time drinking. Along with this movie, I recommend "The Fool" ("Durak").