In his impressive debut film Little Odessa,' director James Gray focuses on a family threatened by the Russian-Jewish mafia.
DESCENDED FROM RUSsian-Jewish immigrants to America, writer-director James Gray's first film, "Little Odessa," represents in some sense a return to his roots. But this isn't a cinematic trip back to the world of our fathers; instead, "Little Odessa" focuses on the more recent immigration which has brought with it to the United States "the Organizatsiya," the ruthless Russian mafia.
Pitching his debut project as a cross between "Pulp Fiction" and "Mean Streets" - with a few dollops of "Dr. Zhivago" and "The Godfather" thrown in - Gray, a novice 25-year-old University of Southern California film school graduate, managed to attract the necessary money and stars in order to make a small, dark film which nevertheless
has had a big impact. It debuted last September at the Venice Film Festival in Italy, where it received the Silver Lion trophy, and generated a major buzz within the film industry for months, before opening in late May to mostly enthusiastic reviews in New York and Los Angeles.
"Little Odessa" is set against one of the wintry, windswept streets of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where recent waves of Russian Jewish immigrants have carved out an ethnic enclave bordering on Coney Island. The movie's protagonist is a young Russian-Jewish-American hit man, Joshua Shapira (Tim Roth). At the film's outset, Shapira is dispatched to Brighton Beach, the neighborhood where he grew up, in order to perform a contract killing on a man he does not know, for reasons neither he nor the audiences ever learns.
Roth reluctantly returns to Brighton Beach, which is home to both a local mobster with a longstanding grudge against him, and his own estranged family. Preoccupied with the numbingly banal logistics of murdering a nameless man for unknown motives, he finds himself nonetheless forced to confront the imminent death by cancer of his mother, Irina (Vanessa Redgrave); the misguided sibling loyalty of his younger brother Reuben (Edward Furlong); the implacable antipathy of his fa- ther, Arkady (Maximilian Schell); and the renewed interest of his former lover, Alla (Moira Kelly). Roth's conflicts with his family and his mob enemies eventually intertwine, and climax in a shootout with tragic results.
Stripped of its genre trappings, "Little Odessa" is really only nominally about the Russian mafia, a subject Gray learned about from newspaper articles, from talking to police, and from hanging out with Russian-Jewish former classmates from Brighton Beach.
"I didn't want the film to be a documentary on the subject," he says, "but more about the essence of being Russian." And indeed, "Little Odessa" delineates a keenly felt atmosphere of intense brooding which feels like it is blowing into Brighton Beach straight from the Russian steppes. Convincingly shot on location in local apartments, crumbling storefronts and restaurant back rooms, Gray's film offers a study, mostly in black, of a family imploding under the weight of its own impenetrable pain and silence.
Press the director just a bit, moreover, and he will acknowledge that the family depicted here is, in some senses, his own. Indeed, the character of the Shapira patriarch Arkady, embodied with ponderous perfection by Austrian-born actor Maximilian Schell, was inspired by his own late Russian-Jewish immigrant grandfather, Jack Gray.
NOT, GRAY THE GRANDSON hastens to note, that his grandfather, who arrived in the U.S. in 1923, ever sired a mob assassin. Gray's father teaches business management and economics at the New York Institute of Technology; his mother is an instructor of home economics at Queens College. He himself attended the Kew Forest School, a posh private high school in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, where he was one of the few Jews in the student body "of people with names like Skip Worthington." Here, he found himself "spouting off in Latin" even before he had his bar mitzvah, and "grubbing for grades."
But the clash in his movie between the dark and brooding Old World sensibility of the cultured Russian immigrant and the more upbeat, vulgar and sometimes equally stultifying New World outlook of its second-generation Americans, comes from a real place. So much so that it inspired an instant frisson of recognition in his father when he first saw it.
"It's very much about my family, the way my grandparents were," says Gray. "I wanted to get across the way it felt growing up in New York with my Russian grandparents - that weightiness, that tragic weight of being Russian. It's like a serious part of being. You walk down to Brighton Beach, nobody smiles. I felt the weight of the world in those faces. My great-aunts and uncles… my grandparents… they would come into the house - and I tried to direct Max in this way - with this tremendous sense of gravity."
Gray, whose only previous screen work were student films, assembled his unusually distinguished cast quite by happenstance. He passed the "Little Odessa" screenplay to British actor Tim Roth, who has appeared to great acclaim in Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," through an agent whom they shared. Roth liked the script; with him aboard, Furlong and Kelly, both eager to work with the increasingly incandescent actor, followed suit.
Redgrave and Schell, says Gray, were both long shots. "We sent them screenplays, and they both called to say they wanted to do it." The director never dreamed either of them would agree to work for virtually no money on a small feature with an untested director. Nor was he daunted at casting Redgrave in a Jewish role by her reputation as a fierce opponent of Zionism and champion of the Palestinians - "Not for more than two minutes, anyway," he says. "Vanessa Redgrave is one of the world's great actresses, and if she wants to do your movie, you've got to use her."
With a $ 2.3-million budget raised from investors and the film's distributor, New Line Cinema, on the strengh of its script and cast, "Little Odessa" moved into production during what turned into the hardest New York winter in 150 years. Whatever this may have added to the film's sense of wintry desolation, it detracted from the director's task to get his story before the cameras.
"We were four hours late to the set every day because of massive blizzards," recounts Gray. "You'd get there and have four pages of screenplay, and you'd have to do it all in one shot."
All that effort appears to have paid off, at least if the box-office receipts end up matching the movie's positive critical reception. But one dissenting note, says Gray, came when someone recently accosted him at a New York screening insisting that his depiction of Russian Jewry in "Little Odessa" was anti-Semitic. Gray acknowledges that the Tim Roth character was particularly difficult to imbue with any sense of vulnerability or, given that he is a hit man who contemplates whacking his own father, even humanity.
But anti-Semitic? "My guess is it's a lot less negative than (one that propagates the stereotype of) the nebbish nerd Jew. Woody Allen excepted, there are stereotypes that deserve to be shattered. Besides, even though this guy is a killer, this is a very sympathetic family devastated by tragedy, a family having to handle a large amount of tragic circumstance. I hope there would somehow be a resonance in audiences. At least, I thought there was something here that was interesting enough to make a movie about."