Leviathan (2014)

This review contains mild SPOILERS throughout, though they are not significant enough to actually spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the film who is, at least, familiar with the story of Job.

It’s not often I drive 50 miles to go and see a film, so when my friend and I were greeted with the news that the screening of Leviathan we had travelled an hour to see had been postponed our disappointment was tempered just a little by a certain sense of irony. As it turned the cinema had been sent a copy of the immersive 2012 fishing documentary Leviathan rather than Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 drama of the same name.

The mix-up however, only goes to show the enduring popularity of the leviathan metaphor and the resonance of the Bible’s book of Job. The story and the powerful imagery that accompanies it has long held appeal for writers and artists.

Having finally got to see it, Zvyagintsev’s film did not disappoint. Whilst Leviathan may not ultimately have won this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar&TM; it was amongst the nominees and caused a stir earlier in the year when it won the Golden Globe in the same week that criticism emerged from the Russian authorities. Bizarrely it failed to win Russia’s Golden Bear award for best film despite a mountain of international acclaim.

The objections from the authorities - both from government officials and from the Orthodox church - are not hard to understand: Leviathan shows both in a negative light, complicit in the events which see Kolya's life spin out of control. It starts when the, seemingly corrupt , mayor uses a compulsory purchase order to turf Kolya off his land. Kolya's old army buddy shows up, offering legal expertise, but escalates the case and then sleeps with Lilya, Kolya's wife.

Things continue along this downward trajectory, meaning comparisons with Job are never far away, but unlike his biblical counterpart, there is no Hollywood ending. The final scenes sees his house being demolished, mirroring the fact that the rest of his life is already in ruins.

The leviathan of the film's title appears in numerous different guises. There are the more literal shots of a whale surfacing from the sea briefly as Lilya ponders her life. Then there is the huge skeleton that lies stranded on the beach, the seemingly invulnerable beast of God's speech proven to be mortal, nevertheless.

Then on a more metaphorical level there is Kolya's battle with the impassive establishment that upholds the mayor and seals his own fate. The system that could be abused in the first place, the courts that rapidly fire off their judgements unmoved by Kolya's protests. Then there is the police who make their initial assumptions and fail to ever really challenge them, like Bildad and his friends only with handcuffs instead of words.

Perhaps the most interesting appearance of the leviathan motif appears as Kolya's house is demolished. In perhaps the film's most visually memorable shot we see the mechanical digger ripping away the wall of Kolya's house shot from inside the house. As the digger's boom reaches up and the scoop arches in the air, it looks for a moment like a mechanical sea monster devouring it's prey, as indeed it is.

Lastly there is the church who may not exactly aide and abet the mayor in his villainy, but certainly offer little resistance and, as the final shot reveals are the ultimate beneficiaries of the mayor's scheming. For a moment the film's final scene appears to offer some ambiguity. Periodically throughout the film the mayor has discussed the meaning of life and faith with his bishop and as the bishop leads a service in a beautiful church the mayor momentarily breaks his beatific pose to whisper to his son "God sees everything, son". Has the mayor somehow been transformed by his conversations with the Bishop? But the film's final shot, at the end of the service reveals that This new church has been built on the place where Kolya's house once stood, his drive way now replaced with a car park full of expensive SUVs.

Yet the depiction of Christianity here is not uniformly negative, in contrast to his bishop, Kolya's local priest, Father Vasily, is one of the few characters still there for him at the end. Whilst Kolya is buying vodka to drown his sorrows, Vasily is buying bread for the poor and it’s in their subsequent conversation that direct mention of, and quotations from, Job are made. Seemingly out of the blue Vasily asks “Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or throw a rope on its tongue?” (Job 41:1) and goes on to tell Kolya the story of Job. But it’s difficult to know what to make of Vasily’s version of events. I’m not sure I agree with his explanation that “In the end God took pity on him… and explained it to him clearly”, nor am I convinced that “Job resigned himself to his fate”. Yet the conversation forms a connection between the two men, indeed it’s the last time that anyone in the film speaks to Kolya with compassion and humanity.

Whilst this part of Leviathan’s script means that, on a textual level, it is more biblical, its bleak images don’t quite carry the spiritual power of The Return. There, the images that stay with you are of a beautiful world, largely untouched by human hands. Here, for all the beauty of the shot of Kolya’s son crouched by the skeleton of a whale on the beach, it’s the human aspects of the images that stay with you - the crumbling buildings, the shabby-chic interiors and the beautiful church interior - a white-washed tomb if ever there was one. The imagery here reflects violence, death and decay, and from the moment Koyla strikes his son in one of the film’s opening scenes, there’s a sense of unease and foreboding about the violence that is waiting in the wings.

Perhaps it’s just me, but this sense of violence brewing reminds me of the disturbing deaths of Job’s children in the book’s opening chapter. Whilst Job gets is ultimately rewarded with new children it seems unlikely that this would ever really have compensated him. Indeed it makes me realise one of the things that is most disturbing about the Book of Job is that one of its later editors thought his jarringly “happy ending” would paper over the deep theological cracks left by all the pain and suffering that his predecessor expressed so eloquently.

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All quotes are taken from an early version of the script and so may contain slight differences from the words spoken in the the film’s final cut.

Bible Films Blog Review of 2014

In previous years, I’ve offered a review of the year, although this has rather fallen by the wayside in recent time. However, 2014 was a bit of a stonker, so it would seem remiss not to do at least something.

The big news was, of course, the long awaited release of a number of biblical epics, which hit not just the odd art-house cinema, or graced a local congregation with a decentish video projector, but in the local, everyday cinemas. Russell Crowe was talking about Noah in primetime TV shows. The Guardian was offering opinion pieces about Moses every time Ridley Scott coughed in a vaguely atheistic manner.

As it turned out neither film made the, um, waves, that their respective studios had hoped for and neither director will be pleased to hear that they are more likely to win a Razzie than an Oscar come the spring.

But before all that there was the matter of the Son of God - not so much the actual one as the cinema release of the Gospel footage from the History Channel’s 2013 series The Bible. Cutting down a TV series to a movie is a risky strategy. On the one hand the popularity of the “best of” genre might mean that he TV series might just be part of a lengthy marketing campaign – the world’s longest ever trailer if you like. But the question still remained, why would people get in their cars, drive out of town and pay through the nose to watch something they have already seen for “free”?

As it turned out Son of God did rather well, perhaps because compelling answers were found to that question. Buying a ticket to Son of God was a statement of faith, a chance to send a message to Hollywood. Or you could buy two and bring along a friend with whom you wanted to share your faith.

From an artistic point of view however the quality of the product was largely the same as that of the original 2013 series. Jesus was still too blond and off-puttingly good looking; the dialogue and the acting still left a great deal to be desired; and it still wasn’t really clear what Jesus was actually about other than being nice.

One Bible film hero who eluded, with consummate ease, any charge of being overly nice, was Russell Crowe’s Noah, who shifted from grunting environmentalist to genocidal maniac over the course of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. It’s the kind of precipice along which many edge along when they tell us how bad humans in general, and children in particular, are bad for the environment? But that’s another matter.

Actually the scenes where Noah contemplates whether he should kill his own granddaughter were, in my opinion, rather misunderstood. Noah didn’t want to murder members of his own family, he just thought it might be what “The Creator” was calling him to do. After all it was the logical extension of what he had already done – a point that may of the faithful struggle to appreciate. It was a great performance from Crowe, but the terrain of unlikeable anti-hero seemed to leave the film, rather than just its antihero rather unloved. It was a shame. Aronofsky’s bizarre epic was drenched in biblical and other religious references, many of which weren’t even half as odd as the original text.

December is often a busy time of year for those of us interested in Bible films and 2014 would prove no exception. In the cinema Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings (my review ) received a fairly lukewarm welcome in many western countries and was banned in several countries in North Africa and the Middle East. In the current climate it's hard to know which is more damaging, western indifference or Egyptian anger.

In the west the film's biggest talking point was the supposed white washing, casting Joel Edgerton and Christian Bale as an Egyptian and someone who manages to pass as an Egyptian for forty years. I must admit I can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand Christian art has always portrayed the faith's heroes in its own image as a way of relating to them. At the same time, as my comments above about Son of God suggest I also like to see more realistic casting.

One film that did embrace a more ethnically accurate Jesus was The Gospel of John the latest output from the Lumo Project (an offshoot of Big Book Media). The series, which is available on Netflix, narrates John's Gospel over dramatized reconstructed video footage. Jesus is played by Selva Rasalingam who is half Tamil. If his face is familiar it’s because he has been playing Jesus in various Lumo/Big Book projects over the last few years, including the music video for Deliriou5?'s "History Maker" and the BBC’s The Story of Jesus (2011). Also part of those projects, as well as 2012’s David Suchet: In the Footsteps of St Paul, is director David Batty.

The Lumo Project will eventually cover all four gospels in the same style, and Netflix features narration in both the King James and the New International versions of the Bible. As a medium it’s very similar to the Genesis Project’s Gospel of Luke (1979) which starred Brian Deacon and was recut as Jesus (1979), certainly it’s quite different in feel from other the two Visual Bible word for word projects Matthew (1994) and Gospel of John (2003).

Given that John’s Gospel only received the word for word treatment 11 years ago, it’s surprising that the filmmakers have chosen to start with John, particularly as John’s wordy gospel is perhaps the one least suited to such a treatment. Personally I wished they’d opted for the only gospel not, yet, to have been filmed this way, Mark. But that will later this year if the IMDb is to be believed. Hopefully it will get a UK Netflix release as well. Incidentally 2015 will also see Rasalingam star as James in a Jesus-cameo film Clavius

The appearance of The Gospel of John on Netflix seems to reflect a broader trend of niche faith-based films being broadcast away from traditional channels. Another such production in 2014 was The Red Tent, an adaptation of Anita Diamant’s historicalish novel of the same name. Diamant’s novel took the stories from around Genesis around Leah and Jacob’s daughter Dinah and re-imagines Shechem as her lover rather than her rapist. Young’s mini-series, which aired on the Lifetime network early in December, cast Rebecca Ferguson, star of 2013’s excellent The White Queen’s, and also features Minnie Driver, Debra Winger, Morena Baccarin and Hiam Abbass in prominent roles. Peter Chattaway has a great interview about the series with the director Roger Young.

The other TV film worth a mention was the BBC animated short film On Angel Wings, which aired in the UK on Christmas Eve. It starred an old man recalling the visit of the Angels on the first Christmas night to the group of shepherds he worked for and how one angel secretly flew him to the stable so he got to meet the baby Jesus. Readers may recall my enjoyment of the Fourth King a fictional tale about the magi. On Angel Wings would make a good companion piece dealing as it does with Jesus' other Christmas visitors.

Then there were several smaller films which brought the more poetic parts of the Bible to the screen. The Song re-imagined the life of King Solomon as an amorous country singer, with nods to both Song of Songs/Solomon and Ecclesiastes. Meanwhile Amos Gitai directed one of the short films in the anthology film Words with Gods. Gitai already has two fine Bible films under his wings, [Esther (1996) and Golem: l'esprit de l'exil (1992)] and here he took the on the work of his namesake, the prophet Amos.

Perhaps the most significant of the films dealing with the more poetic parts of the Bible was Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan. As with The Song it took the form of a modern story, this time the story revolves around a man fighting corruption in the coastal town where he lives, but there is also a healthy dose of the Book of Job. It's also likely to be the most successful of those films with a substantial link to the Bible, having been Russia's entry for the foreign language Oscar it's now one of the final nominations and has already won the Golden Globe in the same category.*

Documentary-wise it was a fairly light year, though it's more than possible I missed something. David Suchet did feature in In the Footsteps of St. Peter, the follow up to his 2013 In the Footsteps of St Paul .

However, there were a couple of new books about Bible Films that are worth a mention. David Shepherd's "The Bible on Silent Film" looks to be an excellent guide to an under-discussed period in the genre's development. I couldn't afford the hardback or a Kindle editions so I've only read excerpts but the bits I've read are full of fascinating detail and insight. Technically the hard back was released right at the end of 2013, but seeing as the paper back will be released in March this year, we can split the difference. I'm looking forward to getting a copy.

Another book to touch upon the sub-genre is Graham Holderness' "Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th-Century Fiction and Film" which touched on Last Temptation of Christ, The Passion of the Christ and The DaVinci Code, as well as various books about the life of Jesus. There were also various books released related to the films mentioned above including a picture book for the team behind Son of God.

And lastly there was a conference. Not so much about a Jesus Films as a very close relation. "Jesus and Brian: or What Have the Pythons Ever Done for us?" ran for three days in June in Kings College, London and featured an impressive team of speakers, including John Cleese and Terry Jones, and even gained some national press coverage. Sadly neither time, nor money, nor health, permitted me to be there, but Mark Goodacre made it, blogged about it and did rather rub salt in the wounds of those of us who would have loved to be there but weren't. I mean, he got to meet John Cleese.

Anyway 2015 promises a great deal. There are various films due for release about which Peter Chattaway is doing some great blogging. He also posts numerous things on the Bible Films Facebook page, for which I'm incredibly grateful. There's also a few books to look out for, including David Shepherd's follow up volume "The Silents of Jesus" and there might even be a book with a couple of chapters by myself to report on in next year's review of the year.

*There were some subsequent edits here, made after the Oscar nominations

Where is my Father: New Job Film

I'm still ploughing through my inbox at the moment so if you are STILL awaiting reply I should get to you soon.

One of the items in their was a message from the writer, producer and director of an ultra-independent film about Job based in Canada. Randy Hiebert was inspired to write a screenplay for Where is my Father after his "wife suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm during a Sunday worship service" and his "son suffered a concussion during a youth retreat". Whilst both have since made a full recovery it seems that this was a time when the book of Job struck a chord with him. 6 years later and the film is available to buy online. You can also watch the trailer at the Interlake Christian Films website. The website also gives details of a limited number of live screenings for anyone who is interested.

A Serious Man

I've been very slow off the mark with the Coen brothers' latest film A Serious Man, partly because I missed the pre-release discussion on the film's content, partly because it took an age to arrive in the UK, and then partly because it's taken it even longer to get to Loughborough. However I thought I'd make a few comments on what the film has to say particularly about how it relates to specific parts o the Bible.

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A Serious Man is the Coen's take on the Book of Job. Like Job the lead here – Larry Gopnik is running into calamity after calamity, and like the book, our hero is frustrated by the hopelessly unhelpful advice of three supposed sages. In contrast to Eliphaz, Zophar and Bilhdad – who are largely indistinguishable from oneanother – here the three rabbis are, on one level at least, very different. The first is very young, crammed into a tiny office and thinks the car park is profound. (Take that American Beauty).

The second rabbi is more senior but equally vacuous. He lacks the youngers useful enthusiasm and has little to compensate save a bizarre story of a dentist who found one of his patients had Hebrew scribed into his teeth. Finally there is the elusive Rabbi Marshak. He has the biggest office of all and is protected by an officious secretary just so he can sit an think. Yet when we finally meet him – and it's not Lary but his son who gets the opportunity – he has little else to add to his colleagues trite aphorisms.

But I've skipped ahead of myself a little. The film opens in what is appears to be some part of Eastern Europe. Certainly it feels like a deleted scene from Fiddler on the Roof only with subtitles (which are apparently easier to read if half of them are not chopped off the screen by a lazy and/or incompetent projectionist). This prologue concerns a man who, like Gopnik, has been having troubles of his own. When a man helps him put the wheel back on his cart he invites him back to his house for soup. But when his wife hears the name of their guest she is horrified. The man has been dead several years. This must be a dybbuk (an evil spirit). Determined to prove her husband wrong she stabs their guest in the chest. He takes it very well, and only bleeds a little, but now the couple know that either way they are cursed. Either they allowed a dybbuk into their home, or they have just murdered an innocent man.

Given that this is the Coen's take on the Book of Job, it's fair to assume that this story is as critical to the rest of the film as Job's prologue is to it. Whether this is simply a parable illustrated or an account of Larry's ancestor's never becomes clear. The key, for me, is the way that this story relates to the film's core. Larry suffers and cries out to God, but hears nothing. By contrast, the man in the prologue gets help almost before he asks for it, but his unlikely helper takes his identity with him to his grave. The Coen's picture God saying you ask for my help and expect my intervention, but then when I did help you, you stabbed me in the heart. It's no doubt an mistake to interpret this thoroughly Jewish film in terms of Christian theology, but I find myself powerless to resist - the man who unexpectedly steps in to help is killed by those he came to save.

There is another reading of this opening that has occurred to me as well, that this man is indeed a dybbuk. He then becomes the Satan figure who is roaming the earth at the start of Job. The dybbuk is not angry when he is stabbed by the wife. On the contrary he praises her for her cunning. Satan also seems to have been impacted by humanity's shrewd decision making. So this opening scene could represent the incidents before the book's prologue. After all the Coen's have been so upfront about the fact that this film is based on Job that it would be fair enough to assume that their audience is familiar with the cosmic bet.

Betting rears it's head later in the film in the most unlikely of people, Larry's brother Arthur. Arthur is convinced he has figured out a system of probabilities for predicting the future, and whilst it seems to work at cards it doesn't fare so well in the field of predicting approaching policemen.

I'm not sure whether ultimately Arthur is meant to represent Job's fourth advisor, Elihu, the/another dybbuk, or God himself. In fact to push the allegorical nature of this story too far would be a mistake. My hunch is that he is the Elihu figure. He's less qualified than the three rabbis but his words are occasionally more on the mark. The directors (god-like figures) don't seem to condemn him as harshly as the rabbis, and there is certainly some truth in the scene when he tells Larry about all the good things he has.

Like her literary equivalent, Larry's wife is part of the problem not part of the solution. Perhaps anticipating the sinking nature of the good ship Larry she gets out at the sart of the film. She doesn't quite tell him to ("curse God and) die", but is equally if not more unhelpful than Mrs. Job.

Another thing that intrigues me about the film is it's time period. I've been surprised that nothing I've read about this film comments on the fact that the film is set in APril/May 1967 - just a few short weeks before the six days war in Israel. For a film that has been praised for it's refusal to dumb-down its jewishness, the absence of any direct mention of the impending war cannot just be an oversight. Not when maps of the Holy Land adorn various walls. Yet having made that observation I find it hard to know what to make of it. Is the territory gained in the war a sign of the restoration and blessing we find at the end of Job? That seems unlikely. Is the suffering of Larry being linked to the suffering of Israel or Palestine. Is the absence of God in the film suggesting his absence from that conflict? I honestly don't have a clue, but I'm sure it's of significance.

[Spoilers]
Ultimately the film ends with an impending storm which recalls rather vividly the opening words of the final section of Job (38:1) where God answers Job "out of a storm". Yet whereas this is the point where things begin to turn around for Job - he's humbled, yes, but also vindicated and the beginning of his rewards are just around the corner - it's also the point where things are about to really start going wrong for Larry. His son looks likely to die in the tornado, he himself is about to receive a serious diagnosis, and perhaps fail to get tenure. Is this because he has finally decide that God will not come through for him, and he may as well take the money and solve two problems in one transgression?

And what about the unlikily named Korean student Clive (C[see] and live?). He is also the very opposite of Larry. Larry understands the maths but, by his own admission, doesn't understand the picture of Schrodinger’s Cat. He can't handle the mystery. Clive on the other hand understands the less tangible things in life. He gets Schrodinger’s Cat it's just the maths he can't do.

One of my favourite comments about the book of Job was a joke made by a friend of mine that it's ending seems "a bit Hollywood". It's notable, then, that in what is probably the fullest exploration of Job yet to emerge in American cinema the 'Hollywood ending' is nowhere on the horizon.

Belated Bits on A Serious Man

There's been a criminal lack of discussion here about the Coen Brothers' latest film A Serious Man, in part due to the fact that it doesn't open here for another 10 days. Still, for a film that has been billed as a modernisation of the Book of Job, I probably should have mentioned it by now.

Given that it's been out in the States for a while, there are doubtless a hole host of links I could post, but for now I'll limit myself to just two. The first is some comments by Julia O'Brien, Many thanks to Eruesso for sending me the link over a month ago. I've been meaning to post it up for a while, but haven't had the time.

Secondly, my friend Ron Reed has posted 18 "Questions for Further Study" over at this Soul Food Movies Blog. Oh and here's Ebert's review for good measure.

Adam's Apples and Job

I've had an email and a comment (presumably from the same person) asking about film portrayals of Job. It was actually something I looked at over the summer when we covered the book in Through the Bible in Five and a Half Years. There are very few films on Job, but I did couple across enough to justify forming a label / tag on Job.

One film I've been meaning to write about in this respect is the Danish film Adams Aebler (Adam's Apples). I've not actually seen it, but NT Wrong offered a few comments on it when he saw it in October, and I've been meaning to catch it ever since. Here's a brief excerpt:

But the film would be merely annoying and unsatisfying if it weren’t for its subtle intertextuality with the Book of Job. I say ’subtle’ — but there is the fact that every time the bells are rung at the small county church, the walls shake, Adam’s framed picture of Adolf Hitler falls from the wall, and the bible which Ivan gave to Adam falls off the dresser onto the floor, opening each time at the Book of Job.

Wrong goes on to notes how these elements draw attention to the film's plot about a Pastor whose suffering is revealed as the film progresses. So it's an allegory rather than a straight adaptation, but still sounds interesting to those looking for films that explore the themes we find in Job.

As a side note, my wife has just finished reading "The Vicar of Wakefield" which apparently contains similar themes, and the thought occurs that Adam's Apples may also be based on this book given the thematic similarities and the profession of the leading character.

South Park on Job

My Through the Bible in Five and a Half Years course is covering Job tonight, and as I've been busy with the new baby (and his sister and mother) I asked my friend Stu to lead the session. And I'm glad he did. Whereas previously I had only been aware of one film about Job he remembered that South Park covered the story a few years ago in their own irreverent fashion.

The Job clip featured in Cartmanland (season 5) where Cartman inherits $1 million and builds his own amusement park. The official South Park site (which features a number of clips from the episode) gives the following synopsis:

Cartman inherits a million dollars from his grandmother and fulfills his lifelong dream of owning his own amusement park: Cartmanland! A hemorrhoid erupts in Kyle's ass when he learns of Cartman's undeserved fortune, making him question the very existence of God and whether there's any reason to stay alive in a world where someone like Cartman is happy.

You can also hear creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone discuss this episode on YouTube.

De Oliveira's Film Featuring JobMon Cas/O Meu Caso/My Case (1986)

My friend Peter Chattaway emailed me to let me know about O Meu Caso - a film by Manoel de Oliveira which features an appearance by Job. O Meu Caso, also known as Mon Cas and translating as simply "My Case" in English is four part film with each segment shot in a different style. The sole IMDb reviewer describes the four parts as follows:

1) on stage, during a play's rehearsal; 2) as one of those films of the 1910s and 1920s, in which people moved at an accelerated pace; 3) with a chromatically-charged photography and dialogues of a sense of the absurd only equalled by the likes of Beckett or Ionesco ; 4) in a dusky setting, serving as a metaphor to our civilization's current state of affairs, the BOOK OF JOB is recited by biblical characters.

It seems the film may be doing the rounds at the moment, perhaps in celebration of de Oliveira's 100th birthday year, (and apparently he's still alive and making films!) So Doug C of the new Another Film Board saw it in a double bill with the director's passion play documentary O Acto de Primavera (The Rite of Spring), and it will be screening at the Torino Film Festival on the 21st and 29th November this year.

I've not managed to find a great deal more out about this one. It seems fairly clear that "Job" only appears in the final segment, but that Job-like themes run throughout the picture, and it's based on plays by José Régio and Beckett. There are some interesting details here, and a couple of Portuguese pages about the film (which I've passed through Google translation) here and here.

I can't recall any other films about Job, although the IMDb details a 1936 production which it describes as a "Televised Ballet based on Blake's vision of the Book of Job".