From Vladivostok, along the desolate Siberian railway line, through the scrutiny of the protagonists’ most personal turmoil, the engrossing thriller “Transsiberian” reveals its secrets like a matryoshka doll. A gripping mystery which ratchets up the suspense while exposing the intricate, introspective consequences, “Transsiberian” is a police drama with brains and brawn.
Upon completing a church mission in Beijing, a married, middle-class Iowa couple — Jessie (Emily Mortimer) and Roy (Woody Harrelson) — begins a sightseeing train journey to Moscow. However, they aren’t drawn as Midwestern stereotypes because director Brad Anderson and co-writer Will Conroy infuse the characters with quirky individuality and plausible personality traits.
Jessie is a thirty-something, adrift, agnostic, and ambivalent. She does not despise the bourgeois lifestyle she could be slipping into; it just doesn’t feel quite right. Jessie’s become a victim of her own expectation of herself. And as a recovering addict, she not only confronts her alcoholism but the shame of her clear longing for the intoxicating allure of her partying days, the undeniable buzz of that lifestyle. Jessie could be from Iowa, or Seattle, or Charleston, for that matter, and she’d still thirst for that time in her life when nihilism was just another way to say “make mine a double.” In yet another nuanced performance, Mortimer emotes fragility but always girded with her doe eyes steely fixed.
At first blush, Roy may seem a bit of a sop, with a golly-gee wonderment at every small detail of railway life, but Harrelson doesn’t oversell the earnestness of the jocular, religious hardware store owner. He is goofy, like the sort of guy who would mow his yard in black socks, yet he’s genuine, and he’s hardly the cuckold that you initially think he will become. As a couple, they possess a clear fondness for each other, but their fundamental differences validate the choices the story has bestowed on them.
The relative ordinariness of their trip is usurped when they are joined as cabin mates by an enigmatically itinerant couple, the menacingly charming rascal Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and his recalcitrant girlfriend Abby (Kate Mara). Both Noriega and Mara embody their characters solidly, but the toothy Noriega, especially, chews the scenery with a wonderfully cheeky performance. As Grinko, a sagacious yet still inquisitive cop, Ben Kingsley is similarly and fascinatingly multi-layered.
Anderson is the director of indie features such as “Next Stop Wonderland” and “The Machinist” but he’s also helmed episodes of several of America’s most recently revered television police dramas, including “Homicide” and “The Wire.” And that TV experience of commingling gumshoe whodunit with insight into the peccadilloes and worse of intriguing characters is expertly manifested in several scenes where casual conversations subtly morph into an illuminating view into the characters’ psyches.
He also suffuses the railway journey with visceral earthiness and authenticity, from the claustrophobic sleeping compartments to the crowded and convivial proletariat dining cars choked with cigarette smoke, and crammed with hearty and craggy faces clinking shot glasses.
Like Scott Frank’s unjustly overlooked “The Lookout” from last year — a smart and absorbing crime flick that also centers on an equivocal Midwestern hero — “Transsiberian” unfurls a serpentine plot which, though carved with sinister switchbacks, retains a genuine attentiveness for the plight of the personal odyssey. It’s noir, with a soul.
