Film

Pardon me; it’s been forever since I’ve seen Sidney Lumet’s one-room jury drama 12 Angry Men, on which this Russian import is based. But watching the new version, it’s hard to tell them apart: the bloody Chechen standoff, the Rambo-like hunting knife that spins menacingly around a juror’s head, the leisurely two-and-a-half-hour pace that allows for endless flashbacks to muddy orphans and rubble.

Liberties have clearly been taken. Nikita Mikhalkov, the film’s brassy, nationalist director (a kind of Muscovite Mel Gibson), is not an artist known for subtlety. Still, you watch 12 and something close to admiration creeps in. Lumet teased out notions of subtle racism among the heads-down working classes as they deliberated over a Spanish-speaking “bum.” Mikhalkov’s teenage defendant, meanwhile, is a “stinking Chechen dog” and a “terrorist.” “We’re just trophies to them!” screams one juror, a brusque taxi driver (Garmash, in the Lee J. Cobb role), preying on the fears of a decade-plus war. (A new 12 Angry Men might not be so bad stateside.)

Even more fascinating is the commentary on today’s evolving Russian Federation: “We have new lights, but old wiring,” says a bailiff in a line that’s too spot-on, even if he is referring to an actual power outage. Establishing reasonable doubt isn’t the nature of these seen-it-all post-Soviet “comrades, er, gentlemen,” straining to enact a process that’s new to them. Similarly, 12 itself straddles New Moscow’s attempts to play big-budget Hollywood (e.g., the computerized Nightwatch) and Russia’s traditional classical humanist cinema. There’s too much glitz here for a story about stripping away the lies from the truth. But the movie doesn’t exactly fail. Justice is done.