Trials and Tribulations

THE EXTRAORDINARY film Leviathan takes place in a tiny coastal town on the other side of the world, but it relates to all our dreams and fears.

A man is tormented by bureaucracy, as the authorities try to take his house. He has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and a very unhealthy one with his partner. He works on people’s cars, does favors for people who ask him, and tries to raise his son as best he can. And he’s caught between the wheels of historic oppression and emerging forms.

Leviathan, this year’s Russian nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is a work of uncommon cinematic bravery, for the people who made it take on the corruption of their current political masters. Vladimir Putin appears briefly, as a portrait looming over the office of the mayor trying to take our hero’s house. But the graft, selfishness, and cruelty of Putin’s imperial reign are palpably present in the mayor, who has been fighting the householder for years to get his property, for reasons that owe more than a little to the legacy of Soviet-era patriotic ideology. Communism has been replaced by a heady mix of nationalistic pride and elitism religion, whose boundaries are enforced with no mercy. Pussy Riot’s punk prayer gets a mention in a priest’s litany of things that are undermining Mother Russia. It’s the same old story, there and everywhere—keep the nation pure, confuse spirit and law, and wreck your own life by denying the glories of human diversity.

The brilliance of Leviathan is that it tells three stories at once—it’s worth watching three times, each through a different lens. It’s a story of small-town greed and individual brokenness, as one man struggles against another’s violence when it is already hard to hold body and soul together. It’s a political epic, painted on the massive canvas of contemporary Russia’s struggles to free itself from the shadow of Stalinist repression. And it’s a mythic parable, explicitly invoking the story of Job as a template for what happens to our protagonist.

When the lead character’s crisis becomes a tragedy, a priest tells him that Job had to resign himself to his fate before he could become content. It’s an ambivalent message, because the messenger represents an ambivalent institution, but it also has a kernel of truth about suffering. Leviathan shows courage in naming the evil of the powers that be. It is more interested in exposing them than offering easy answers.