Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Strangers
on a Train
(Transsiberian, 9/29/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
With
Russian tanks on the move again into places that aren't Russia, it looks
like the Big Bad Bear is back. Brad (The Machinist) Anderson's
drug-and-thug thriller Transsiberian has rolled into in town
right on time, because dread of the new bear is different: instead of
the dead hand of Soviet authoritarianism, Putin's Russia seems to embody
lawlessness. It's a gangster state with nuclear weapons.
Not that there's anything overtly
topical about Anderson's tight, terrific film. The premise is more visceral
than political, for being a passenger on the longest train trip in the
world, the 5,000-mile run from Beijing to Moscow, is about as trapped
as you can be. As constricted as the space is inside the cars, it is
limitless outside, with nary a patch of civilization for hundreds of
frozen miles at a time. When Anderson shoots inside the sealed carriages
his characters might as well in locked in a spacecraft; when his camera
rises to give us a peek of the Transsiberian express from above, it
seems as isolated as James Cameron's Titanic in mid-ocean. In
neither case is escape possible.
The script (by Anderson and Will
Conroy) concerns a mismatched American couple on their way home from
missionary work in China. Roy (Woody Harrelson) is an evangelical who
exhibits a kind of gung-ho chipperness that is rare as a flamingo among
the dour, backcountry Russians. His wife Jessie (Emily Mortimer) is
cut from darker cloth—she's got a wild past, and occasionally lapses
into referring to "Roy's church" as if this missionary activity
was all his idea. The long train journey home is also for Roy, to indulge
his hobbyist enthusiasm for choo-choos.
Along the way they meet a younger
couple (Eduardo Noreiga and Kate Mara) with an odd familiarity with
the ins-and-outs of smuggling stuff by rail. Indeed, Carlos (Noreiga)
is toting around a suspiciously large collection of Russian matryoshka
(nesting) dolls, and shows more than polite interest in getting his
stash close to the innocent-seeming Jessie.
More need not be said about the
plot except that it eventually involves a Russian narcotics detective
(Ben Kingsley). As the cop gets into a Dostoyevsky-ish cat-and-mouse
game of suspicion with Jessie, the ever-capable Kingsley is as shifty
as a Soviet gearbox and as opaque as borcht. He has a way of turning
to her skeptically and saying "Jeh-sieeee" in a tone that
sounds like a gulag door swinging shut.
But not even he is as good here
as Emily Mortimer. Near as I can recall, this British actress best known
in the US from Woody Allen's Match Point, or maybe the handful
of episodes she did for 30 Rock. In this role she runs the gamut
from wide-eyed innocent abroad (but not really) to bad girl finally
off her leash (but not without regrets) without ever striking a false
note. Indeed, she plays a full and complex person, which only intensifies
the suspense and is—incidentally—more than many actresses
get to play in thrillers of this type. It's one of the best performances
of the year.
If Transsiberian slips its
rails at any point, it's because the script seems a little fuzzy on
exactly how Kingsley's character ends up sharing a stateroom with the
Americans. Anderson might also have given us a more visual feel for
the Siberian wilderness—a task admittedly made harder by the fact
that the film was shot in Lithuania. But those shortcomings are no reason
to miss this train .
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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