Tonight I saw LEVIATHAN, winner of the Best Screenplay award at this years Cannes Film Festival and Russias official Best Foreign Language Film entry for the upcoming Academy Awards. It reminded me that the older I get, the less tolerance I have for even a well-made film that makes me feel bad or depresses me. The film is indisputably well-acted and shot with grim, forbidding beauty; plus it features a main musical theme by the great Philip Glass, which never hurts. But director Andrey Zvyagintsev (along with co-writer Oleg Negin) paints such a relentlessly bleak vision of life, with characters who live in blocky, windowless squalor, conduct loveless affairs in drab, indifferently furnished rooms, and anesthetize themselves to the point of stupor with vodka while battling one another for the rights to a scrubby, unattractive spit of coastal land. And guess what? It ends in tears, recrimination and death, with the miserable punished and the other miserable (no one in this film is ever genuinely happy, even by accident) at least slightly richer. I think it goes without saying: This film made me miserable. Its a brutalist exercise in Eastern European miserablism. (And did I mention its miserable?) Its seeming point: Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I already knew that, and at least Shakespeare had the decency to keep me entertained while he told me. The film made me feel like I imagine some of you must feel around me when the Black Dog has got me at my lowest. If so, I sincerely apologize, and understand why phone calls may have gone unreturned and emails may not have been answered. I will definitely try NOT to be the LEVIATHAN of friends going forward…and as for me, I want to make an effort to experience more art in 2015 that puts a smile on my face. Heres hoping that the last few films I see this year do a better job of doing just that.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:05:36 +0000
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