TRANS-SIBEREAN

Brad Anderson, writer/director, 2008

 

HOOK:  Edgy Hitchcock-like paranoia Unlimited.

 

STORY:  “Sexy Beast” Ben Kingsley is a crooked Russian cop in the twisted

He's not just Gandhi anymore!

fate of American couple Jessie (Emily Mortimer) and Roy (Woody Harrelson) who have been conducting charitable work for their church in China. Their journey crosses frigid Siberia, as well as the metaphorically darker, colder regions of lust and greed.

 

GOSSIP:  Brad Anderson, best known for his movie The Machinist (in which Christian Bale lost 63 pounds doing the lead), played Don in “A Chorus Line” at the Berald Schoenfeld Theatre, New York City—he was paid in beef-jerky.

 

JOHN: This is a must see masterpiece.  The plot will leave you shaking your head in astonishment for days after. It is tight, clever, full of little touches, and comes to a satisfying climax with that ironic turn at the end that was always so satisfying in Hitch’s movies. And the casting! If you though you could never take the hempy Woody Harrelson seriously, this is the part he was born to play. And the range of emotions Emily Mortimer and Eduardo Noriega can conjure within minutes will take your breath away. The people in the story start out normal, become suspicious, then creepy—and we in the audience are the ones who feel guilty. Russian paranoia without the communists.  

 

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four)

 

SPANKY:

I loved the little foreshadowing in the dining car when a fellow passenger tells the young American couple how customs authorizes cutting off two toes of a tourist because of a visa discrepancy…then he gets up and hobbles off. Or the way Harrelson is suddenly missing at an early stop—this would be the entire plot of a lesser movie. But in this case, it neatly parallels later, more shocking events. The storyline reminded me of a Patricia Highsmith novel (she wrote Strangers on the Train, The Remarkable Mr. Ripley) in which a miner indiscretion leads a character further and further outside the law until the consequences are unbearable. Trans-Siberian hurtles us back to those glorious tales of intrigue that populated the film screen in the 30s and 40s. (By the way, I added that part about “beef jerky.” I love that shit.)

 

“TWO PAWS UP” (4 BARKs out of four)

 

KEEPERs:  “Cut off all my demons and my angels might die too.”