The Truth, the State, and Store-Bought Justice

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 46
Michael Apted (director), Gorky Park

Three corpses lie buried in snow in Moscow’s most popular amusement park. Evidence suggests they were shot in broad daylight, two of them more than once, yet somehow nobody noticed. Then, when a curious KGB officer with no regard for procedure partially uncovers them, they reveal their most grisly sacred: the bodies have been mutilated, their faces and fingertips flensed. No way of knowing who they were.

The film noir tradition has its history in places of moral degradation and political malaise: Vichy France, London’s dockyards, McCarthyite America. Working from a novel by Martin Cruz Smith, director Michael Apted applies the same principles to Soviet Moscow. Apted leads us through a world where politicians love ideology but don’t live by it, where money greases the Cold War’s wheels, and evidence doesn’t determine truth, the state does.

Chief Inspector Arkady Renko (William Hurt) tries to unload the Gorky Park murders onto the KGB, not because he believes the murders are political, but because the KGB so clearly doesn’t want them. He’s accustomed to turf battles with state enforcement, so the state’s hasty acquiescence worries him. Especially when the autopsy reveals that at least one anonymous corpse belongs to an American national, an oddity in Soviet Russia.

Despite the Soviet Union’s society nominally being undivided by class, Renko is something of Moscow aristocracy. His superiors repeatedly name-check his father, a war hero, which probably explains why he outranks officers significantly older than him. Renko has, however, chosen a career in the Militsiya, the nationalized Soviet civilian police force, a dimly regarded profession for a member of the nomenklatura. This causes suspicion among an already distrustful bureaucratic hierarchy.

That same hierarchy quickly introduces Renko to Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin), an American importer. Osborne wears slick suits, seems chummy with Moscow’s swells, and sleeps with much younger Russian women. When Osborne starts asking pointed questions about Renko’s investigation, Renko starts suspecting Osborne’s motivations. It seems Moscow’s chief prosecutor might share those suspicions, and urges Renko to investigate further.

Martin Cruz Smith wrote the original novel after spending several weeks in Moscow in the late 1970s. His book, and Apted’s subsequent movie, were condemned as anti-Soviet propaganda, and banned by the pre-Glasnost state. However, in fairness, Smith’s American characters hardly emerge smelling like roses. When Jack Osborne transparently bribes Soviet officials, those officials buy in hastily, making Osborne complicit in state-based suppression of facts.

Lee Marvin (left) and William Hurt at the big reveal of Gorky Park

Besides Osborne, another American begins probing the investigation. William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy) lurks around the crime scene’s periphery, but when Renko approaches, Kirwill rabbit-punches him and runs. Renko, his curiosity piqued, searches Kirwill’s hotel room, where he finds a gold-plated badge. Seems Kirwill, like Renko, is a homicide detective, NYPD. Renko quickly reminds Kirwill this isn’t his patch, and confiscates the badge.

Throughout the movie, the Moscow nomenklatura remind one another that Renko is one of Russia’s best homicide investigators. Quickly, however, we discover what “best” means. He casually lies to informants, threatens witnesses, and carries an unregistered sidearm. Despite showing no ambition to rise in the Soviet state, a tendency which worries his power-hungry superiors, Renko mixes a strong belief in justice, with a casual disregard for procedure and tedium.

Renko’s attitude arises from his circumstances. He learned early that powerful people manipulate rules, that the state’s ideological rigidity doesn’t translate into honesty. The same Soviet enforcers who censor media and redistribute private property, maintain a background life of lavish parties and under-the-table financial dealings. They attempt to break up the back-alley black market economy, while maintaining the exact same practices in their gilded offices and lavish country dachas.

Apted’s physical design emphasizes the movie’s moral themes. His Moscow (mostly shot in Helsinki, Finland) is constantly saturated with light. This illumination doesn’t make anything clearer, though: reflected off concrete buildings and mounded snow, Moscow’s constant sunlight is more blinding than enlightening. William Hurt squints into this overlit streetscape with the intensity of a man who loves and defends his people, but has clearly come to hate his city.

In some ways, this movie is distinctly dated. Its Reagan-era anti-Soviet propaganda, backed with James Horner’s melodramatic score, clearly belongs to the early 1980s. But in other ways, with its intrusive government that dictates policy, and its police who guard order without underlying principles of justice, this movie clearly describes our present. It’s easy to see ourselves, and the authorities who dictate our lives, portrayed in this film.

Because really, in forty years, neither post-Soviet Russia nor America has learned very much.