Little Odessa: He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

A native New Yorker, Gray has returned to Brooklyn many times throughout his career, and his depiction of the borough has a bone-deep credibility. His path to filmmaking, though, began in Los Angeles, where he has now lived for many years. He studied film at the University of Southern California, and his thesis project impressed producer Paul Webster, who approached him about making a feature. There was nothing in Gray’s quiver at the time, but Webster said that was no problem, that he should go ahead and write something. In Nathan Heller’s 2019 New Yorker profile of Gray, the director recalls Webster suggesting that he tell “the story of your relationship with your family, but add a genre hook.” When I spoke to Gray in 2024, he explained how much the film drew from his personal experiences: “I had met somebody I based Tim Roth’s character on . . . The mood of that apartment was the mood of my house in that period of my life.” The Russian hit men whom Gray had encountered in his youth were not “home cooks like the Italian mob guys in Goodfellas.” Rather than “colorful” characters, “they were actually sociopaths and psychopaths.” Dead souls, one might say.

The drilled-down quality of Little Odessa reminds me of a saying in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” The film’s narrative thrust is well served—no, is actually defined—by Gray’s sense of purpose. This is a movie he needed to make. These are characters he needed to bring to life. The urgency that propels the film is heightened by its sense of realism and local detail, combined with a directness that has led some critics to describe Gray as a classicist. His visual style here is marked by the resolute perspective of his camera, which may have arisen in part from necessity—even in 1994, a budget of a little over two million dollars didn’t invite stylistic indulgence. And while some of the most startling imagery in Gray’s future films, like the final shot in 2013’s The Immigrant, does look as if it took some doing, the accomplished but much more unadorned imagery in Little Odessa hardly lacks for immediacy. Gray never averts his gaze, no matter how painful the scene.

Behind the camera was cinematographer Tom Richmond, who brought with him both a keen eye and a wild-man reputation. Gray once recalled that he didn’t quite know what to make of Richmond during preproduction, particularly when he repeatedly announced, “I’m going to be the camera.” But with Richmond’s intense commitment established, the filmmakers developed a strong rapport. Gray was grateful for the elder man’s generosity; the director was only twenty-four years old at the time, and the DP encouraged Gray as he insisted on choosing lenses and adjusting lighting setups.

There’s a key passage about twenty minutes into the picture that serves as a beautiful example of their collaboration. While Joshua is still antsy about people knowing that he’s back in Brooklyn, he has gotten more comfortable spending time with Reuben. The sequence begins with an almost surreal shot of three pristine white gulls hovering in a gray (of course) sky, followed by a view of a Coney Island street covered in snow. The brothers are enjoying maybe the only real moment of reprieve they’ll share in this story, and all around them is the dead of winter. Richmond’s camera is so acutely perceptive that you can practically feel the cold. Joshua is tearing into Nathan’s french fries; Reuben’s got a frank. Joshua interrogates Reuben, casually teasing the kid: Was he bar mitzvahed? Did he get a lot of money? Does he have friends? Reuben shrugs, and Joshua kicks him playfully. They both throw their trash over onto the beach. Of course these guys would be litterbugs.

Joshua getting goofy with his kid brother is a strangely sweet sight, but the joy can’t last. One of the movie’s most punishing ironies is that things begin to go terribly wrong once Joshua decides to act as his brother’s keeper, even as he tries to maintain a relative distance. In the next scene, the protagonist carries Reuben’s bike up the stairs to the family’s apartment. Richmond and Gray’s framing of the ensuing near-showdown—in which patriarch Arkady (Maximilian Schell, perfectly understated even in rage) balks at Joshua’s presence—is startling. In a 1997 interview, Roth said the film is about “a family where the devil has gotten into their house.” Compounding the calamity, of course, is that this devil belongs to the family. (Though the domestic conditions of Gray’s youth were not quite as extreme, he experienced a good amount of family unrest; his father, a businessman, was indicted on multiple counts of fraudulent activity, and his mother was dying of brain cancer while he was in college.) In future Gray films, brothers will reconcile (as in 2007’s We Own the Night, where the peace is terribly hard-won), and a son will find a father as well as the revelation and/or resolution that said father could not (in 2016’s Amazon-set epic The Lost City of Z and in 2019’s space-exploration drama Ad Astra). Such moments of catharsis and reconciliation do not even present themselves as flickers in this picture.

No relationship in Little Odessa is easy. Joshua looks up an old girlfriend, Alla (Moira Kelly), and her first words to him are “What do you want from me?” “I wanted to see you,” he tells her. “But I didn’t do anything,” she says, as if a curse has been delivered to her. Nonetheless, she later lets him make love to her, and the way he physically handles her is odd—a kind of aroused tenderness teetering on the edge of brutality, as if she’s an alien life-form. True connection sometimes seems to be just a pipe dream.

A wide vein of melancholy runs through this concise, diamond-hard film, whose riches are abundant. Among them are the remarkable performances that Gray elicits from his cast, a splendidly luminous one for a first-time director to be gifted with. As Irina, the incredible Vanessa Redgrave conveys the constant pain of the cancer that’s killing her character without ever overtly expressing it. Schell depicts the self-delusion of someone who finds himself impotent wherever he turns, until he discovers he can be quite horrifically powerful as a betrayer. Furlong and Kelly represent two different kinds of innocence betrayed. Paul Guilfoyle, as the mobster Volkoff, is as lizardlike as the reptiles Joshua and Reuben check out on a visit to the New York Aquarium. And Vadim, as the flunky Sasha, is eye-rollingly clueless.

Gray is attuned to idiosyncratic, lived-in detail in every part of the film. There’s the mordant humor of a missing prosthetic leg; the cramped, smoky quarters of the social club where Joshua enlists his comrades to carry out his next assignment; the crying of the jeweler as he’s about to be killed, and Joshua’s merciless remark—“Wait ten seconds and see if God saves you.” By presenting the execution in silhouette, Gray spares us gore but not destruction. His gaze is steadfast to the end, as Joshua does what needs to be done in the wake of multiple senseless shootings, without shedding a tear. His near-ritualistic shrouding and burning of a body reflects his determination to leave no trace. Joshua knows that he has just committed acts even more unspeakable than what he has been used to committing for a living. And now he seems to have a quiet awareness that he has annihilated himself—and is condemned to keep walking the earth anyway.

Given the devastation Joshua leaves in his wake, his words early in the movie take on a terrible irony. Brooklyn’s no good for him? Turns out it’s even worse for those he loved, and those he tried to love.