Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan is stunningly shot and set against sprawling vistas. It is grand scaled, though often intimate, tight, and almost claustrophobic. It is a contemporary parable with ancient, biblical roots.
Aleksei Serebryakov plays Kolya, a mechanic who lives in a house he built by hand with his beautiful (and younger) second wife, on a magnificent, if ever-grey and dour strip of Russian coastline. The film opens with one of its long, meditative sequences, Kolya driving his car across the bleak, though beautiful countryside, tires scratching on gravel, on his way to the train station to pick up Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov). Dmitri is an old army buddy, a close friend whom Kolya calls “brother” and whom Kolya’s son treats as an uncle. He is also a polished, well-heeled lawyer now living in Moscow. Dmitri has come to try to work Kolya out of a bind. Vadim (Roman Madyanov), the town mayor, has seized Kolya’s modest, though well-located property through eminent domain. When Dmitri’s attempts to block the seizure through the courts fails, he produces a scathing file that documents the mini-tyrant’s corruption. That escalates the stand-off, and much of the second half of the film is tightly bound-up in tense expectation of a sudden unleashing of violence.
Zvyagintsev’s film draws its title from philosophical and biblical sources. The allusion to Hobbes’ Leviathan sets the stage for the film’s political stand-off, a fringe community that stands as an allegorical proxy for Russia as a whole. In Vadim’s office, a drab, unflattering portrait of Vladimir Putin hangs on the wall over his desk, lording over the petty tyrant’s explosive, half-drunken rages as he twists his office and power to the service of his personal gain. In that way, Leviathan is a dramatization of a failure of Hobbes’ social contract, of government underwriting the backsliding into a chaotic natural state.
Nature hangs over Leviathan as a blank backdrop. In one of the film’s best scenes, Kolya and Dmitri join local cops on a picnic in the countryside. There the wives slather meat onto skewers as the men guzzle glasses of vodka and shoot guns at bottles lined up against the empty landscape. Here their existence seems to run along the borderline between man and beast, indulging simple carnal pleasures that are the first and last resort of a world of abandoned ideals. The half-drunken, aimless, malaise-ridden existence is the norm of a life in which a half-acknowledged meaninglessness is punctuated by empty bursts of laughter and frivolity. But even here, human desire threatens spoils the apparent harmlessness of these simple pleasures. There is no room in Leviathan for songs of innocence.
There is an undercurrent of meaning that charges Leviathan’s world. Kolya emerges as a Job-like figure. His meager wealth and belongs, his life and his family, all come under assault by the political and personal forces that swarm around him. Hardly the pious man depicted in the bible, it is precisely his faults that make Kolya a strong and endearing hero. Like a character out of Dostoyevsky, his cross is his self, his suffering born of the slow acknowledge of his own insidious insufficiency and weakness. He is a man framed in profile against a stark portrayal of a world that has slipped from its moorings, beached like the skeleton of the great whale that sits like an ancient ruin on the cost near Kolya’s house.
