Little Odessa
Writer-director James Gray’s Little Odessa is a dark movie–so dark you can’t see a thing. Not only is the cinematography somber and moody, the screenplay is opaque. No illuminating artistic vision casts any light into the shadows clouding our understanding; the film ends with the sense that things are still being hidden. It’s not as if we’ve witnessed something beyond comprehension–it’s more like Gray is withholding information, perhaps because he never had it in the first place. Little Odessa, which won the Silver Lion at the 1994 Venice film festival, is an elaborate bluff.
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The father, Arkady (Maximilian Schell), is an insufferable egoist who fancies himself an intellectual, an illusion Gray seems to share. Arkady mouths self-dramatizing poppycock about life’s burdens: his children aren’t disobeying him because he’s a bad father but because “God [is] punishing me.” When he calls to cancel a date with his mistress, he uses the telephone in his wife’s sickroom, causing her to wail in anguish. He also leaves her bedroom door open, which allows his younger son, Reuben (Edward Furlong), to gaze curiously at his sick mother, once again wailing (in anguish?) as her husband mounts her. This may not sound intellectual, but Arkady saves his pontificating for his mistress. “I had two sons,” he tells her. “I always tried to teach them. I played Mozart for them. I was stupid, I guess, to read to a child of two years Crime and Punishment.”
In life as in art, we can best measure the depths of despair once we’ve experienced the heights of joy. But Gray’s approach is monochromatic. If he were to make a family film–the antithesis of Little Odessa–it would probably be so cheerfully bright the audience would be blinded by the end, and every time a character said “I love you,” the response would be “I love you too.” In Little Odessa the characters usually greet such avowals of affection with silence or slip into a foreign tongue, which is problematic for the monolinguals in the audience, especially since Gray provides subtitles only occasionally. Does he expect us to fill in the blanks, to provide our own dialogue? Essentially he’s asking the audience to invest the characters with more depth than he’s provided them. When Arkady cancels his date in the room of his dying wife, we must either charge Gray with a total departure from reality or assume that Arkady wants to hurt her. Later we hear a possible explanation for such vindictiveness: Irina slept with a general to get out of Russia. But such connections are far too few and too fleeting.
