daughteroftiaran

Leviafan (2014)

Loosely based on a true story

I'll be perfectly blunt, this film did not land for me. I'm giving it 7 stars because I can see it was very well made, but the slow pacing and the lack of any sympathetic characters in it killed it for me. (Contrast with The Fool/Durak, a movie with a similar theme which I loved.)

The film's moral (or one of them) seems to be "You can't fight city hall," as ti shows the attempts of a simple man living in a corrupt Russian town to fight a land-grab by the city's fat-cat mayor. Unfortunately for the man, it doesn't end well -- but then again, it's a Russian film, so of course it doesn't.

The film was loosely based on a true story that happened in America : A Utah man, Marvin Heedemeyer, who was fighting against an attempt to expropriate his auto repair shop, up-armored his bulldozer and went on a rampage, destroying several town buildings and the city hall before shooting himself. The director's original plan was to just make a film about Heedemeyer and I kind of wish he had, because Heedemeyer's seems like such an American story (it has everything! Guns! Yankee ingenuity! Pointless destruction!) and I would have been fascinated to see how a Russian director handled it.