FauxNixon

HBO and writer/director Scott Z. Burns bring us this sensational, utterly believable and simultaneously terrifying story of a man named Timofey Berezin (Paddy Considine) working in one of the Soviet Union’s many secretive nuclear plants who is exposed to a fatal amount of radiation and must find a way to get enough money for his wife Marina (Radha Mitchell) and his son to continue to live pleasantly after his inevitable death in what is appropriately titled Pu-239 or The Half Life of Timofey Berezin. The officials at the plant lie about his exposure and try to get him to sign a statement to the effect that it was an error in his judgment to enter a chamber and try to repair some damage. When he refuses, they suspend him indefinitely without pay, pending a hearing. Worried about his family’s future life when he finds out about his true level of radiation exposure, he decides to steal a sizable quantity of plutonium (Pu-239), which is the nuclear material from which nuclear weapons are made, and then try to sell it for the $30,000 he estimates his family will need.

Dying and continually worsening from his radiation sickness, Berezin meets with various  people in an attempt to sell his product to the Russian Mafia at several levels from a boss, to a lower-level boss like a lieutenant and downward to what might be called soldiers or even associates, to use the Italian mafia’s parlance.

A group of three such low-level associates have made a mistake in fire-bombing the wrong address and now must make payment to their overseer for the error or be killed. One of these men is Tusk (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) who takes the dying man from his lieutenant to try to broker a sale of the plutonium, but fails. He then tries to market the plutonium to a boss, where he finds his girlfriend/child’s mother working as a full-time prostitute for the boss, which causes a great deal of conflict and ends any chance of the sale very quickly.

The story is one simultaneously of tragedy and triumph as the poisoning and sale are tragic, but in the end the family is saved by the savvy political machinations of Timofey’s wife Marina.

This movie is a great and one I would consider an independent film since it was financed and produced by HBO. It is fantastically original and its grittiness and texture all feed into the same sense of contamination, desperation and hoodlum-level of society which it purports itself to be portraying.

The director ingeniously makes Pu-239 a film about the harshness of life in Russia and the Soviet Union, even among intellectually-important people, the coldness of the Russian Mafia, and the desperation to which a man can be driven by wanting to protect his family. Considine is such an effective actor in his role as a tragic figure, basically already dead and just waiting for himself to wind down, while fighting as hard as he can to help his family. It is a remarkable film and one that seems to have gone unnoticed by much of the film world, let alone the public itself.