On Criterion, they have a collection of films by James Gray, and I’ve seen some of his films (Two Lovers, The Yards, We Own the Night), but never really got into his movies. I watched his 1994 directorial debut, Little Odessa, which I had heard of but didn’t know what it was about. It was a pretty intense and good crime drama starring Tim Roth as a hitman named Joshua who returns to his Brighton Beach hometown in Brooklyn (the title refers to the predominantly Ukrainian neighborhood of immigrants who moved there from Odessa, Ukraine), and has a complicated reunion with his family. His teenage brother Reuben (a solid Edward Furlong) still sees him as his older brother and wants to be close to him despite that Joshua has this cold, hardened exterior, and basically no soul left. Their mother (Vanessa Redgrave) is dying from brain cancer, and their father (Maximillian Schell) was abusive to his kids and is caring for his dying wife while having an affair with his girlfriend.
My blog where I write about films I enjoy and post interviews I've done with actors and filmmakers. I am a sci-fi fan, an action film nerd, and into both arthouse films and B-movie schlock.
Search This Blog
Saturday, January 6, 2024
Thoughts on Little Odessa
I could see where a lot of Gray’s later films came from, as this had the fraught brother relationship from We Own the Night; the Brighton Beach setting of Two Lovers; and the guy with a shady past returns to his hometown and confronts his family of The Yards.
For being then 25 at the time, Gray got a great cast for this film, and I liked how the film felt so insular in the Russian Brooklyn neighborhood and felt confining, and like a world away from anything else. It also felt of its time to watch because the characters openly smoke in the movie theater and don’t get hassled about it.
It did make me laugh that Joshua kept making people promise not to tell others he was there, then being upset when others found out. He carried himself with slicked back hair, a long black leather coat, and a pissed off look on his face a lot, I think it was fairly obvious to anyone that he looked like a street hoodlum, and his presence wouldn’t be a secret.
I could also see parallels with Furlong’s role here with his later teen brother role in American History X, where he looks up to his brother, who is a white supremacist and murderer, but still sees him as his brother, and takes the wrong influence from him. This role didn’t have Reuben want to be a gangster, but his ease with handguns seemed like a bad influence from his brother, as well as being around crime gangs in the neighborhood.
I’m not always into these kind of crime drama movies, but this was interesting, and I included a scene of the brothers interacting.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment