'Leviathan' a whale of a movie about modern Russia

The filmmaker with the biggest cojones in the world, hands down, is Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev.

He took several million rubles from Vladimir Putin's ministry of culture, and used it to make "Leviathan," a scathing movie about the soul-crushing failures of Putin's government.

And Putin, who likes to put his enemies in prison, will find little to like in "Leviathan" (Oscar-nominated for best foreign-language film), a classic, can't-fight-city-hall story set in a small coastal town in Siberia, a windblown place shrouded in what seems like perpetual twilight.

A mechanic, Kolya (Alexei Serebriakov), learns that his home and business are in the spot coveted by the corrupt local mayor, who has a development project in mind.

There is a bleakly funny tone to all this — the idea that Kolya's desolate location has become a must-have development bull's-eye for the local criminal bureaucracy has the right note of Russian absurdism.

But his predicament is all too real. He's to be forced out, and rewarded with a small fraction of his property's real value. Of course, to Kolya, its full value cannot be calculated, since it represents his life's work and his hard-won independence.

The more he fights the process, however, the worse things get. The mayor and his cohorts make diminishing offers and escalating threats of violence.

But Kolya persists, with a friend and lawyer (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) from Moscow, a man with his own powerful and shadowy connections.

Did Soviet/Russian culture or cinema ever produce anyone like Frank Capra? I doubt it. Capra understood American optimism (sentimentality, if you like) and played to it.

"Leviathan" is the opposite of that. Pessimism is a live presence here, like a grenade with the pin out.

Kolya's second wife (Elena Lyadova), for instance, is much younger and very lonely, and her husband is very distracted, and everyone is pickled in vodka and carrying a gun.

What could go wrong?

Everything, of course.

Getting everything mostly right (the movie is a bit too long), is Zvyagintsev, whose handsome, wide-screen cinematography captures a variety of arresting, memorable images.

The title refers to the defining shot — the enormous, ribbed skeleton of a whale washed up on shore.

Sad relic of a once-great beast.

Online: ph.ly/Movies