‘Leviathan’ is a big, fat Russian metaphor of a film

Starring Aleksey Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov and Roman Madyanov. Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Rated R for language and some sexuality/graphic nudity. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Bottom line: A modern parable of an ancient state

By Roger Moore

Tribune News Service

Here it is, Mother Russia, in all its bloated, drunken, allegorical glory. “Leviathan” is a modern parable of an ancient state and caricatures and stereotypes as old as vodka itself.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film is, like the corrupt politician and hapless proles depicted here, a Soviet era throwback, a tale of people resigned to entropy, resigned to a naive belief in the authority of law and the state until they’re confronted with exactly who those laws and who that state are designed to serve.

Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a drunken blowhard living a modestly successful life in a town along the northern coast. He’s quick to anger, quicker with a dope slap to his rude teenage son. Lilya (Elena Lyadova), his second wife, endures the kid who hasn’t quite accepted her and keeps her mechanic and all-around handyman husband’s vodka glass full.

We meet Kolya picking up an old army buddy at the train station. Dmitri (Elena Lyadova) is now a lawyer in Moscow, a man with faith in the rule of law but savvy enough to know how things really work. Kolya, it turns out, needs a lawyer. The mayor (Roman Madyanov) has decided the city — or somebody — needs Kolya’s hilltop-with-ocean-view house. He may face re-election every few years, but the pugnacious Vadim is just an old school “apparatchik” — a functionary kept in place by the top-down oligarchy that replaced the communist party. Vadim is used to getting his way, so it’s no shock that the ruling, rendered in court and delivered in a high-speed drone by a “judge,” goes against Kolya.

But Dmitri has an ace up his sleeve, “dirt” on the mayor that could finish him.

Vdovichenkov’s Dmitri is droll and bored, but still dogged enough about the system that he’s willing to jump through the hoops he figures will render justice. He’s like a Dostoevsky hero, the last one to get a clue. The nervous, edgy Serebryakov keeps us on tenterhooks, never knowing what he might do next, how he could lash out.

But Lyadova creates a sad, lonely soul straight out of Chekhov, a beautiful woman in an ugly place, gutting fish for a living, trapped by circumstance, loyalty and love in a marriage that is its own dead end.