'Red Riding's' good

Since the dawn of our crummy new century, filmmakers have been casting about for some definitive work of pessimism.

They've found it hard to compete with actual images drawn from collapsing towers, drowned cities, exhausting wars, economic collapse, Sixers highlights, etc.

But they've tried, and sometimes succeeded. Spike Lee's "The 25th Hour," David Fincher's "Zodiac," Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," the Coens' "No Country For Old Men."

Another success: the "Red Riding" trilogy, an impressively detailed work of societal rot originally presented on British television, now arriving in theaters as three separate films.

I think they're very good, although I had the movie-critic privilege of seeing them for free, back to back, with a publicist serving me sandwiches between shows.

You folks are going to have to pay - thrice - and arrange your own schedule of viewing, and who knows if the movies will hit as hard with indefinite intervals inbetween, although you can see them consecutively if you choose. (The movies open today at the Ritz at the Bourse. For info and the various ways the trilogy is to be screened, visit Landmarktheatres.com).

And there's something else you should know - you're only going to understand about half of what the characters are saying.

The movies are set in the 1970s and 1980s in the Yorkshire region of England, where residents speak a language that put me in mind of what Frodo said about the obscure inscription on the Ring: "I think it's some form of Elvish."

Stick with it, though, and you'll be rewarded with something powerful and distinctive - a broad portrait of a decaying society, built around the stories of three men who investigate the ongoing murders of local women and children (very loosely based on the Yorkshire Ripper case).

There's plenty about the narrative that draws from classic portraits of civic corruption - "Chinatown" and the works of James Ellroy are the most obvious influences.

But it's unique as well, thanks to its unusual construction. Each leg of the trilogy is the work of a different director. Each has a varied style, but an amazingly consistent mood (scripter Tony Grisoni penned all three).

The structure is also surprisingly tidy. The crimes and related cover-ups are investigated by three men - a journalist, a detective and a lawyer - and each is granted his own installment.

Andrew Garfield is a young tabloid reporter who digs into a child abduction and finds a string of similar crimes and all manner of obstacles (some within his own newsroom) in the way of discovering the truth.

Police complicity is so profound that, in part two, an outside investigator (Paddy Considine) arrives to circumvent corrupt locals, even as he wrestles with his own personal failings.

Part three musters the closest thing to a hero, given the trilogy's dismal view of humanity - a failed lawyer (Mark Addy) who starts to unravel the ugly conspiracy when he's shamed into representing a mentally handicapped man used as a fall guy for one of the murders.

The trilogy can be faulted for pushing the limits of credibility, but there is something convincing, too, in its view of the predations of powerful institutions, be they in business or government.

And, as a cinematic work, it's different from the movies that inspired it, thanks to its expansive, novelistic scope - it has an unprecedented feel for the passage of time, how it ticks by, without progress, or much in the way of justice.