Written and directed by James Gray
James Gray’s Little Odessa, the story of a hit man’s return to the neighborhood he grew up in, is something akin to a stiff winter wind battering the last burning embers in a rusted steel drum. A ghost story, and a bitter family drama where the confrontation with what was makes the present all the more painful, like the sudden pang of a phantom limb trying to reconnect with what’s no longer there.
Tim Roth is excellent as Joshua Shapira, murderer for hire. Gray doesn’t glorify the trade, where targets are unassuming underworld types who are killed in unspectacular fashion. Joshua is just the dead eyes they look into as a final adieu. Once done, a disinterested voice notes a successful hit, and issues a new target in Brooklyn. The voice does not sound all that fuzzed when Joshua says he doesn’t work in Brooklyn, specifically Little Odessa. But Joshua takes the job.
We soon get his hesitancy. It’s a small place with a long memory, and rumors have swirled around Joshua since he left after the death of a local gangster’s son. It’s part of the local community folklore now, but at the Shapira’s, it’s a painful fact. His younger brother Reuben (Edward Furlong) has become a truant, his father Arkady (Maximilian Schell) a bent nail, and in bed, like some metaphor for their waning family bond, is mother Irina (Vanessa Redgrave), dying in pain from a brain tumor.
Joshua’s “business engagement” plays out mostly in the background, and Little Odessa is the hard struggle of three men trying to look each other in the eye again. It’s for the best, and similar to how a show like The Sopranos used organized crime as a framework for dissecting personhood and family bonds, so does Little Odessa use Joshua’s ghoulish trade as a foil to the spiritual death his return uncovers.
It makes for a heavy affair, and Little Odessa is not about the spectacle of bloodshed, but a much more relatable dilemma of broken relationships. A naive younger brother’s innocent desire to have his older brother back, a father’s mortally wounded affection for a son he already feels he’s lost, and a mother who offers the last soft place for any of these feelings to land.
As that last place of grace, Vanessa Redgrave is a blessing. In a movie where kind eyes are in short supply, but scowls are not, where belt lashings take precedence over embraces, her performance as a dying mother is stripped of vanity and melancholy, and all the misdeeds, bitterness, and fear these men are wrapped up in disappear once they sit down on her bed’s edge. They become boys again, it all just falls away. Redgrave provides that space.
The world doesn’t cease to exist outside, of course, and here Gray struggles in his third act. Joshua has naturally put a target on his back returning to a place where everyone knows him, and he has enemies. The storm brews for a long time before it finally hits Brighton Beach, but in making landfall, Gray has to hot glue his script together at key points, and it comes off contrived against the family scenes, which feel as natural as the setting sun. Gray, god of his little universe, prods his pieces around with a heavy hand and the moves beggar belief.
The major impact of Little Odessa has already been felt at this point, however, and similar to how Joshua can’t undo the damage he’s dealt, so do the well-defined cruel realities of Little Odessa hit harder than the dramaturgical fumblings that see out Gray’s movie.
Mikkel Frederiksen 