Not Hobbes's book, but a recent movie from Russia, by director Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose name I would probably recognize if I were more knowledgeable about contemporary film-making. I only know about it because my late friend Robert recommended it. He described it as "a Bergmanesque masterpiece," and I regret that I didn't have a chance to tell him before he died that I more or less agree with him: "more or less" because I didn't find it as good as the best of Bergman. But it's still very, very good, and it is indeed Bergmanesque.
Apart from Eisenstein's Potemkin, which I saw in college, the first Russian film I saw was with Robert, in the late 1970s when we both lived in Tuscaloosa. I have no idea what the name of it was. As I recall, it opened with a young boy seeing his father killed by a falling tree. It ended with that same boy, now a grown man, being murdered with a hatchet or hammer or some similar implement. "Very Russian," we agreed. Leviathan is also very Russian. It is not a pleasant or cheerful story, but it's a powerful one, very effectively told, and full of striking images. I wish I could see it on the big screen.
The title refers to the leviathan of Job 41: "Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?" And this is a story about a man afflicted by malicious forces for nothing he has done. But the Hobbes reference is also relevant, because a corrupt and powerful state is one of those forces. One hopes that its picture of contemporary Russia is darkened for dramatic purposes. The basic situation is that a man named Kolya lives, with his second wife and his son by his first wife, in an old house on property which is coveted by a local politician and an affluent cleric–a bishop, I suppose, but I'm not sure. Here's the trailer:
If you think that last bit of the score sounds like Philip Glass: it is.
Light On Dark Water 
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