I’m definitely a Tim Roth fan. He generally does interesting, off the main track characters. I’d never seen Little Odessa but remembered reading positive reviews from 1994 when it was in theaters, so chalk up another reasonable plus for Tivo Suggests when I saw the title on my Now Playing list. This is definitely a little film, first one produced from the mind of writer/director James Gray, certainly better than his other effort, a dreary Mark Wahlberg flick called The Yards.
Besides Roth, we have Maximilian Schell as his father, Vanessa Redgrave as his mother, Edward Furlong (still glowing from The Terminator) as his 16 year old brother and Moira Kelly as the lady friend. So pretty good cast. The setting is, as the title suggests, the section of Brooklyn where a community of Russian Jews have settled, a very insular group as immigrant communities very often are.
The tension comes out of the family’s total dysfunction. Roth is a hit man, written off as dead by his parents and unable to visit home anyway as one of his first jobs was the son of the top neighborhood gangster. Furlong of course idolizes his absent brother, perhaps even more based on the rumors about him, and has long since stopped going to school. Redgrave is bedridden, near death from brain cancer, and Schell spends what time he can with a mistress.
Gray has an interesting setting, decent characters and conflict between the main ones but in the end the fatal flaw is a lack of connecting story arc. The film mainly seems to be a corkboard connecting bit to bit. Even so…
recommended
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