Little Odessa

sydney4.0

the story isn't nearly as strong as WE OWN THE NIGHT, but this is much more my aesthetic/psychic wavelength. at least half of this is so powerfully beautiful i could puke, Tim Roth's face almost unbearably so. the fact that he's my longest standing movie star infatuation aside, there are a few moments here where his hard face crumbles or softens almost imperceptibly, and those half-seconds are some of the greatest work he's ever done. Gray grew to be a much better filmmaker, but there's something in LITTLE ODESSA's imperfection that got to me more - it's almost practice for the sweeping epics Gray made later, and maybe its smallness is what charmed me. the kind of movie where you don't realize how strong a hold it has on you until the last 15 minutes or so, and it ends and you just kind of say "oh, shit" and have to sit there quietly for a little while, staring.

JP3.0

This is definitely the weakest James Gray film I’ve seen so far, though it’s not bad for a directorial debut. It shares a similar type of story with The Yards and We Own the Night, but it just doesn’t have the same level of engagement as those films. The performances are fine, but no one really stands out. The one aspect that truly shines is the cinematography, which I’ve come to expect from James Gray. Everything I've seen by him is always visually great. I definitely could see the moments of brilliance that James Gray has shown in his later work. I wish I could’ve enjoyed this one more, but it’s still a decent effort overall.James Gray Ranked

Jake Cole3.5

Watching Gray's films from most recent to oldest, I see a curious trend: each new film becomes more polished and the social and human scale expands (even Two Lovers, his smallest film, has a vastness underneath its intimacy), yet the work gets more operatic in reverse. Little Odessa is aesthetically rawer than any of Gray's other films, yet it aims for the rafters of classical epics, playing its small story of Russian-Jewish heritage and sins of the father for Visconti/Coppola/Cimino-level universality (there's even a direct crib from Heaven's Gate involving a gunshot through a sheet). Subsequent Gray films gradually reverse this dynamic, putting forward an epic, modern frame disrupted by the personal, improvisational character work. A few additional tics grate—the dying mother here is somehow less fleshed-out than the never-seen, long-deceased mother of We Own the Night, to say nothing at all of Isabella Rossellini's character in Two Lovers—but this is still a mighty impressive debut, impressive not merely for its lofty ambitions but for how often it comes so close to meeting them.