Sunday, July 13, 2014


Movie Review

Gorky Park (1983)

December 16, 1983


Published: December 16, 1983

THE colorless, frozen setting against which ''Gorky Park'' unfolds has been oddly but compellingly rendered in Michael Apted's screen version of Martin Cruz Smith's best-selling novel, even though the movie's peculiarities ultimately pose some problems. Substituting Helsinki for Moscow, and having the leading character, a Russian police inspector, played by an American actor affecting a British accent, Mr. Apted has certainly tailored the material in provocatively idiosyncratic ways.

On the whole, Mr. Apted's approach to the material is archly effective, making for a crisp, intricate thriller, well able to hold an audience's interest. However, viewers unfamiliar with the novel may be better disposed toward the movie than Mr. Smith's readers will be, since the screen version of this detective drama is less effectively atmospheric than the book. A lot of information has been crammed into Dennis Potter's shrewd screenplay, to be sure. But the film must juggle so much crime data that it barely has time for the glimpses of Moscow life that helped make Mr. Smith's story memorable.

''Gorky Park,'' which opens today at Loews Paramount and Loews New York Twin, has been aptly named, since the Moscow park of the title represents the hope and freedom toward which the leading character, the police inspector Arkady Renko, is slowly drawn. Gorky Park, Mr. Smith wrote, ''was the only place in the city where you could fantasize''; in another passage, he described it as ''the purest heart of the city.'' And Gorky Park, in the opening scenes of this thriller, is the site at which three mutilated murder victims are discovered, touching off an investigation that links the police investigator Renko, the K.G.B., a sinister American businessman, the obligatory femme fatale and even some highly prized animals, whose presence turns out to be crucial to the plot.

The story is convoluted but it unfolds carefully, with most of the elements painstakingly explained. There is a lot of emphasis on forensic evidence in the murders, much of it quite gruesome; the movie actually has a ''cadavers by'' credit, and it spends a fair amount of time in the autopsy room. However, the gore does not seem gratuitous, and the autopsy footage yields fascinating if grisly results. Renko, following the course of this investigation, is led more and more intimately into a web of deception and intrigue.

William Hurt's performance as Renko is the mainspring of the movie and also its most rivetingly strange element. Mr. Hurt, for some reason affecting the voice of an adenoidal Briton, brings an ironic detachment to the performance, which serves him very well in the film's early sequences. Later on, when Renko falls for the insolent beauty played by Joanna Pacula and spars with Lee Marvin's ruthless American entrepreneur, that reserve becomes more stifling. Mr. Hurt's Renko never seems truly willing to risk much for Miss Pacula, even though the screenplay indicates that he ought to be. And the changes in Renko as the film progresses don't seem terribly pronounced, partly as a result of Mr. Hurt's coolly controlled presence and partly because the screenplay has pared away Renko's friends and family history, thus providing a much sketchier dossier on the character than Mr. Smith did.

Although ''Gorky Park'' seems to grow more tangled and affectless as it progresses, it remains a taut, clever thriller throughout, with Mr. Apted's direction establishing its intensity immediately and sustaining it well. Ralf G. Bode's cinematography and James Horner's score go a long way toward setting a hauntingly bleak mood, and the supporting players, particularly Brian Dennehy and Ian Bannen, are excellent. Only in its most formulaic spy-movie flourishes does the film seem ordinary, or does Mr. Hurt seem to be operating by rote. At the end of the film, he blankly declares ''Look at me, what do you see? A Russian - I could never be anything else.'' Though there's not much to be done with the line anyway, his Renko makes it sound even more disingenuous than it had to.

The Place for Fantasy GORKY PARK , directed by Michael Apted; screenplay by Dennis Potter from the novel by Martin Cruz Smith; director of photography, Ralf D. Bode; edited by Dennis Virkler; music composed by James Horner; produced by Gene Kirkwood and Howard W. Koch Jr.; released by Orion Pictures. At Loews Paramount, Broadway at 61st Street; Loews N.Y. Twin, Second Avenue at 67th Street, and other theaters. Running time: 130 minutes. This film is rated R. Arkady RenkoWilliam Hurt Jack OsborneLee Marvin William KirwillBrian Dennehy IamskoyIan Bannen IrinaJoanna Pacula PashaMichael Elphick AntonRichard Griffiths PribludaRikki Fulton GeneralAlexander Knox GolodkinAlexei Sayle

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