“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?”

Last updated on: January 24, 2015 at 10:33 am by Andrew Collins

“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?” 2015-01-24T10:33:20-07:00 Andrew Collins

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Review of Leviathan, Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev

In a recent blog post for the New York Review of Books, journalist Masha Gessen makes a “bizarre and disturbing” observation about her experience in Russia: people kept dying. It wasn’t like there was a war or epidemic, but the death rate was inexorably high, going back nearly half a century.

Upon digging into the question, she concluded that Russians seemed to be dying from a lack of hope. And despite some improvements since the collapse of the Soviet Union, tragedy is simply written into their lives, going back generations through oppression, wars, and revolutions, and inspiring the greats like Dostoyevsky and Chekhov.

Leviathan follows in that literary ethos. We could summarize it simply like this: The peasant gets screwed over by everyone for no particular reason.

The setting and plot are predicated on two biblical stories: the book of Job, and the account of Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21, where the wicked king Ahab desires to acquire the vineyard of the poor landowner Naboth, and ends up killing him. In Leviathan, a corrupt mayor in small town Russia seeks to seize the land of the humble mechanic Nikolay. In the process of trying to defend himself from the mayor’s wicked ploy, Nikolay’s personal life crumbles around him, leaving him with less and less.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

As Gessen noted, few peoples are more accustomed to suffering than the Russians. In Leviathan most of the characters seem either resigned to their oppressive, dog-eat-dog world, or they embrace it through a perverse theology of power where God’s favor accompanies might, regardless of how it is used. Eventually, however, Nikolay starts to wonder when enough is enough. He accepts a baseline of misery in life – a deceased wife, humble work as a mechanic, strained relations between his son and second wife. It’s nothing that a few good friends, the occasional weekend out shooting, and a bottle of vodka can’t make bearable. But as the hopes in his life are swept out from under him one by one, like the servants bearing bad news to Job, he finds little comfort in family or ancestry of the motherland. Even heaven is closed to him, silent and opaque above a forsaken world.

The spiritual crux of Nikolay’s suffering comes to a head in a last-ditch conversation with the local priest. The priest refers him to Job 41, which he simply starts quoting: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook? Will he make many pleas to you? Will he speak to you soft words?”

The priest goes on to misconstrue the story (Job questioned God’s ways so he got boils? Really? And no mention of Satan.) But he ends up making the right point – in the midst of suffering and hardship, we often can’t explain why things happen the way they do, and we may not ever find the answer – at least not in this life. God’s answer to Job is essentially “I’m God and you’re not, so shut up,” and Job says “Ok I shut up.”

Unlike Job, Nikolay has forgotten God. His problem, the priest says, isn’t necessarily that bad things wouldn’t happen if he had gone to church and taken communion and been generally more religious. His problem is that he doesn’t have a God in which to take refuge through trials.

In the biblical stories, Job had his life and possessions restored to him, and Elijah came on behalf of the Lord to judge Ahab and Jezebel for what they did to Naboth. Leviathan has no such postcript. All have gone aside in this epic without redemption. We can go down the list: the corrupt mayor, discontent wife, rebellious son, hotheaded father, adulterous brother, politicized priest. Looking back over the story, one senses that things could have gone better if just one of these characters had dared to break the cycle of sin, rather than succumbing to either selfishness or hopelessness.

As the film’s producer Alexander Rodnyansky explains, “It deals with some of the most important social issues of contemporary Russia… it is a story of love and tragedy experienced by ordinary people.” The absurdity of the tragedy grips our hearts, because there is nothing remarkable or out of the ordinary about Nikolay. He may have been a bit of a hothead, fiercely proud, but it hardly seems commensurate to what he suffers.

In its bleakness, Leviathan as artistic cinema is magnificent, visually gripping and emotive. Set on the peninsula of the Barents Sea (a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean), the cold, colorless landscape of water, rock, and underbrush is simultaneously beautiful yet empty – barren and forbidden. It joins with the small, decrepit lake town, pale wardrobes, and (ever-present) colorless vodka to reflect the hearts of its characters. You can feel the cold Russian legacy and how it has produced a slate of occupants both profoundly stubborn yet deeply insecure in their heart of hearts. The pacing makes this a point of contemplation, drawing out the 140 minute film with lengthy shots of crashing waves, blowing wind, hulls of decomposing boats, and the skeleton of a whale – a symbolic, bleached reminder of the leviathans that lurk in the watery abyss, far beyond our control.

In the end, Leviathan leaves something for both the believer and heathen to relate to. Several times Dmitriy, Nikolay’s lawyer (and brother), is asked if he believes in God, to which he responds that he believes in facts. He leaves the story with a black eye and fractured relationship with Nikolay, bound for the stability of his Moscow lawyering circles. At another point the film lingers in an orthodox church, where a priest speaks about how freedom is found in obedience to God according to the truths preserved by the church, but a broad swath of characters sit before him. Few appear to be repentant, most are disinterested and likely personally corrupt, as their new cars and SUVs parked outside the church attest. It marks a tragic testament to the institutional power of religion and corrupt small-town Russia, content in its ways while the poor man suffers injustice upon injustice.

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