Secret Police Procedural

Gorky Park (1983), Directed by Michael Apted

By Fearless Young Orphan

Back in 1983 they had us pretty convinced that the Soviet Union was coming to get us! That is why it is interesting to see a 1983 film that is set in Moscow that features Russians as our main characters. The movie was not really filmed in Moscow; they would not have been allowed. Instead, Gorky Park was filmed in Finland and thereabouts. This kind of goes to show you how tense things were between us and them at the time: no cameras inside the USSR.

So I think you have to respect Gorky Park for showing us a movie about workaday Russians without beating us over the head with ideology. Most particularly we can admire the character of Arkady Renko (William Hurt), a Russian policeman who is a devoted citizen of his country and who does not spend the whole movie wishing he were in America. He is a good, smart man who has learned to work around the bureaucracy of his country to get results. The best part of this movie is watching Arkady methodically work his investigation, even while knowing that doing so will give him nothing but trouble.

Arkady begins the story in the middle of the night, as he and his team of police are called to a murder scene. Three people are found shot in the snow by the skating pond of Gorky Park, with their faces expertly removed, thus ensuring that identifying the victims will be nearly impossible. The KGB also shows up and Arkady all but begs them to take the case off his hands: investigating murder is a good way to get in big trouble with the KGB, because it seems fairly common that murders are committed by the KGB. Arkady figures this is the case this time: the bodies are too expertly handled to be anything else. He offers to eliminate himself The fuzzy hat: you’re not a Russian without one. as a middleman.

But the KGB won’t take the case. Go on and investigate, they tell Arkady. He’s very worried. A couple years before he had a run-in with a high-ranking KGB official and he fears this might be a setup specifically to wreak revenge on him. Arkady has friends in high places who promise to protect him, but we the audience can kind of tell that this is a bunch of hooey. Arkady is a man in a lot of trouble.

This is a long movie and a carefully drawn mystery, based mostly on character development. At just over two hours long, the movie has very few chases and very few fights, and a lot of Arkady talking to people. It found its way onto the spy movies page because it is about the KGB peripherally and defection from the Soviet Union as well, and espionage is involved. Despite that, it really is a murder mystery. Arkady traces a few small clues to where they lead: a rich furrier who seems to have an inordinate interest in Siberian sables and who knew all the victims, and a beautiful young woman Irina (Joanna Pacula) who is desperate to defect, terrified of anyone in authority, and maybe willing to lie about murder in order to keep herself safe and on the waiting list for getting out of the country. Also in the mix is a New York detective (Brian Dennehy) whose brother was one of the victims. He figures into the plot mostly as a convenience, to carry out some tasks that Arkady doesn’t have time for while he’s talking to other people. Lee Marvin also stars as the furrier, Osborne.

The mystery is an interesting one, and you’ll be surprised how much the furry little animals figure into the motive. Arkady thinks he has it figured out but he can’t prove anything, and of course eventually he realizes that in order to prove anything, he might have to endanger and lose Irina. He and Irina are in love or something a like it; she’s a damsel in distress, involved in the mystery in more ways than one, and Arkady would like to, ahem, “protect” her. He is also coming to trust and then rely on the American cop, and vice versa. Brian Dennehy does well with his small part, believable as a tough ‘murican from New York. So looking at this strictly from a human-interest standpoint, it’s actually quite a good story.

A lot of your enjoyment will depend on how well you take William Hurt in the role. Arkady is a smart, cool man, unafraid, loyal, and too clever for his own safety in this risky homeland of his. He’s sort of a Communist Humphrey COPS: Moscow Edition Bogart, maybe a bit more elegant. Hurt plays him in a way that usually seems appropriate, with wry humor and a killer’s eye for injustice. He uses a strange accent, however, as if the director told him to speak with a British accent (which should convey that he’s Russian, for some reason?) and Hurt wasn’t quite up to it, so sometimes that is distracting. Occasionally his dialog is far too poetic to be realistic. We don’t believe for a second that a real man would talk like this. I’d say that for 90 percent of the time, I was very happy with his performance. Arkady is a great character who plays things very close to the chest. I just had to chalk that other ten percent to bad choices.

Another problem with the film, the larger problem, is that the character-driven plot must still sometimes have some action in it, and that’s when the story gets sloppy. This is mostly a matter of logistics. Moscow is a big city, but our four or five major characters seem to be able to stumble across each other with perfect timing, every time. They have no trouble bumping into each other on the streets, arriving just in time to witness important events, to be exactly where they need to be sitting or standing in order for another character to approach them. Like maybe there are only ten people in the whole city anyway? The methods Arkady uses to solve his mystery range from bright (he takes the skulls to be reconstructed by an anthropologist, who is played by the guy who plays Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars prequels!) to completely cliché (the old ha-ha-I-got- your-confession-on-tape trick).

Alas, this leaves us with an imperfect film. We’d never be able to call this a classic of the genre; there is too little thought behind its mystery and far too few spies. On the other hand, it is rather a fascinating, and unusually fair, look at life in a city that we thought at the time was populated by nothing but boogeymen and monsters. In 1983, the idea that a Russian could be a smart, patriotic, self-aware man was almost controversial. Don’t take that for granted, should you decide to watch.