By Simon Abrams

Transsiberian
Directed by Brad Anderson
at the Paris & Angelika Film Center


If you can look past the gimmick of Christian Bale’s weight loss, you can see an unabashedly old-fashioned, noirish attitude in writer/director Brad Anderson’s The Machinist (2004) that carries over into his latest film, Transsiberian. Both are playfully subdued psychological thrillers that could just as easily have been B-films from John Frankenheimer’s 1960s period save for the grisly violence that pervades The Machinist and (thankfully) only rears its head twice in Transsiberian. With no skeletal movie stars or clichéd third-act revelations to sully its ebullient nostalgia, Transsiberian is a superior film, albeit one that seems to have arrived several decades late.

While it’s set in contemporary Russia, Transsiberian is rife with Cold War paranoia. Jessie (Emily Mortimer), a precocious American traveling from China to Moscow on a Trans-Siberian train with her stuffy husband Roy (Woody Harrelson), has her faith tested in the mixed-up, godless land of the Reds.

Transsiberian’s Russia may appear to be a spiritual, if not impoverished, country thanks to one or two impossible-to-miss Orthodox churches, but in practice it’s a backward land where drug dealers like Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) skulk behind every babushka, and shady cops like Ilya (Ben Kingsley) spout aphorisms about his people’s superstitious but prescient knowledge between shots of vodka. In fact, when Roy goes missing mysteriously, a hotel clerk shrugs his shoulders and reassures Jessie, “This is Russia.”

Anderson and co-writer Will Conroy fill Transsiberian with cheerily dated stereotypes—Ilya scowls behind his cigarette like it were his job as Roy’s toothy grin and clueless chuckle make Clark Griswold look like an international man of mystery—for the sake of recreating a time period in genre film history that seems long gone. It’s a world of strong, well-meaning good girls and treacherous foreign devils that chase after them. It may not be relevant or particularly PC, but it is a very entertaining time capsule buried decades after its time.