Odessa meets its maker - director brings movie to Apollo

The screening of writer/director James Gray's film Little Odessa was a rare opportunity for elbow-rubbing. The film was shown at The Apollo Theater on Wednesday and was followed by a question and answer period with Gray - first at the theater and then at a reception in the Rice faculty lounge hosted by Visiting Asst. Professor of Classics Christopher Spelman.

The film was shot on location in Brighton Beach, New York, a section of Queens, one of the city's outer boroughs that is heavily populated with Russian immigrants, many of whom are Jews from "White Russia" and the Baltic Republics. It takes place during a particularly brutal New York winter which suggests eerie eastern European scenes. The central family members are all beleaguered with depression and tragedy.

The mother, Irina (Venessa Redgrave) has a brain tumor and is slowly dying. The father, Arcady (Maximillian Schell), is unfaithful, and has tenuous connections in the Jewish Mafia. Not surprisingly, the son, Reuben (Edward Furlong), suffers from high-grade depression and is trying to keep his month long truancy from school a secret from his father. "I…thought it was much more interesting if we just saw Reuben as a kid who was damaged from frame one," said Gray of his character choices. All this is in place when Reuben's brother, Josh (Tim Roth), a hitman who has been living in Eastern Europe, returns to New York.

Spelman, who invited Gray to Oberlin to screen his movie, believes that the film bears psychological resemblance to Greek drama, particularly Oedipus Rex, in that "…each protagonist comes up against a structure that is beyond his capacity to understand or control." Spelman's Myth and Religion class has been surveying classical and contemporary drama in order to compare the role of the hero in both eras. Films viewed have included You Only Live Twice and Batman Returns which were paired with the Homeric epic. Hesiod's Theogny was compared with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. For Gray's Little Odessa, the class read Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.

In the movie, Josh is called back to his old neighborhood to assassinate an Iranian Jeweler who is in competition with the Jewish mafia. Josh hopes to make a quick exit and not let anyone know he's in the city, but of course Reuben finds him, thus entangling Josh in the family troubles. The movie then follows the traditional course of tragedy to a bloody end with most of the characters being killed and the audience left unsure who to root for.

After the film, Gray conducted an agressively informal discussion of his motives and beginings as a film maker. "Standing here makes me feel like King Schmuck," he said, giggling shyly with his head lowered. Red-haired, slight-featured and teetering from right to left on his feet, Gray admitted to being an aesthete in his work, by design, and to using appearances as his primary tools.

Describing the overall idea that he wanted to create with the movie, Gray said, "I was mainly interested in creating a certain mood. I wanted to get that miserable look and feel that a house gives when somebody is dying...It's awful." He said he believes that what appearances can do is portray the ethos of a film. "I found that not a lot of other directors are interested in that."