Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Proving Vote Suppression

by digby

I see that Nate Silver has published a reassuring piece on Voter ID laws indicating that we needn’t worry too much about it affecting the outcome. I’m sure this will make all the serious people feel much better about the voting issues. It’s a tough problems to solve and it would be nice if we didn’t have to.

But Ed Kilgore reminds us that it isn’t just a matter of demanding photo IDs:

But before expressing any relief, it’s important to remember that what we are all calling (in a term mostly popularized by Ari Berman in his reporting on the subject in The Rolling Stone and The Nation) “the war on voting” has many, many elements, some of which won’t be apparent until just before or even on and after Election Day. There are ex-felon disenfranchisement initiatives, which have already gone into effect in Florida and Iowa. For one thing, voter ID requirements already in place before the 2008-2012 window that Nate is looking at may have a much greater impact under Republican administration. There are restrictions on various forms of “convenience voting,” such as early voting opportunities. As we get closer to Election Day, we will almost certainly see, in jurisdictions controlled by Republicans, shadowy purges of voting rolls to get rid of people whose addresses have changed, and late and poorly advertised alterations in (or restrictions of) traditional polling places. And on Election Day itself, we always see voter intimidation efforts, and my personal favorite, poorly staffed and incompetent balloting administration producing long lines and discouraged voters, with all this chicanery concentrated on areas likely to produce large Democratic votes (i.e., minority neighborhood and college towns). And then there are the vote-counting irregularities Florida made famous in 2000.

And even where these maneuverings don’t affect the presidential contest, they could well change the outcome of down-ballot contests, and also create precedents affecting future elections. On top of everything else, conservative activists will spend Election Day in some locales trying to generate “voter fraud” and pro-Democratic “voter intimidation” stories that will serve as the justification for future assaults on voting rights.

I would just add that when people think they are being targeted by hostile Republicans, many just figure it’s the better part of valor to avoid the confrontation. This would apply to someone who’s had brushes with the law (not convicted felons) and don’t want to call attention to themselves. But also citizens of foreign birth who might just figure it’s not worth it to endure the hostility and suspicion they’d have to go through. I realize they should all tough it out for the good of God and country, but you can’t really blame them for not thinking it’s worth it.

I’ve been writing about this since I started blogging and it’s not a new phenomenon, by a long shot. We all know about the Jim Crow laws that spurred the Voting Rights Act in the first place. I hope people also remember that these laws didn’t just outright deny the vote to African Americans. It just made it impossible for them to exercise their right to do it, through onerous tests and taxes. And once the Act was passed, the people who wanted to deny them their rights didn’t just stop doing it. They came up with subtler methods of getting the job done.

They have been particularly worried about voter registration, which started in the wake of the Jesse Jackson campaign in the 80s:

Democratic activist Donna Brazile, a Jackson worker and Albert Gore’s campaign manager in 2000, said “There were all sorts of groups out there doing voter registration. Some time after the ’86 election, massive purging started taking place. It was a wicked practice that took place all over the country, especially in the deep South. Democrats retook the Senate in 1986, and [Republican] groups went on a rampage on the premise they were cleaning up the rolls. The campaign then was targeted toward African-Americans.” As in the past, Republicans justified the purges in the name of preventing the unregistered from voting. But Democrats charged vote suppression.

It didn’t end in the 80s. The most recent victory in that regard was the destruction of ACORN (with the inexplicable help of the Democrats!)

It will be hard to muster the empirical evidence that vote suppression turned an election so very serious political observers will dismiss it as being an hysterical overreaction on the part of the losers. And in a big sweep election it obviously would be. However, we are living in a polarized political world in which some elections are going to be very close. When that happens, these vague (and not so vague) pressures on the franchise could very well make the difference. But we won’t be able to prove it. And that’s the beauty of it.

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Please stop trying

by David Atkins

The President speaks:

As senior aides for President Obama and GOP rival Mitt Romney stepped up their political attacks, the president said he was frustrated that he had failed to change the toxic political atmosphere in Washington after he was elected in 2008.

“Washington feels as broken as it did four years ago,” Obama said Sunday in a taped interview on the “CBS This Morning” show.

“And if you asked me what is the one thing that has frustrated me most over the last four years, it’s not the hard work. It’s not the enormity of the decisions. It’s not the pace. It is that I haven’t been able to change the atmosphere here in Washington to reflect the decency and common sense of ordinary people – Democrats, Republicans and independents – who I think just want to see their leadership solve problems.”

He added, “There’s enough blame to go around for that.”

The President is a smart man. By now he must know that what is broken about Washington’s politics cannot be fixed by goodwill, common sense, heart-to-heart meetings, or a transformative charismatic figure.

Washington is broken because corporations can bribe and intimidate even good legislators with unlimited amounts of money, because the media is more interested in balance than truth, and because about 30-40% of the country truly believes that the government’s primary job is to deliver the cosmic justice of divine punishment to those lesser humans who didn’t work hard enough enough to be wealthy, male, or white.

Sure, people want to see leadership solve problems. But two halves of this country tend to have very different and diametrically opposed perceptions of what those solutions should be.

Nothing much can be done about that, so it would be nice if the President would stop trying. As the President proved with the Ledbetter Act and the Affordable Care Act, you don’t need to fix Washington’s culture to impose your will on it. You just need a bare minimum of legislators to pass the bills. All the attempts to achieve compromise with the other side of the aisle were functionally useless. A lot of nasty concessions had to be made to various corporate interests just to get to 60 recalcitrant Senators to pass the Affordable Care Act. We might even have been able to enact single-payer if all we needed were 50 Senators.

Right now the biggest roadblock to reform is the filibuster. No matter who controls the Senate, start by killing the filibuster. It hurts us in the long run much more than it helps. Sure, it might allow some crazy Republican bills to pass, but that’s a good thing. Let the people see what Republicans really do when they get the wheel. And then make the wheel just as easy to turn back in the other direction. Government would be less stable, but much more responsive. Over the long term, the Senate itself is a dysfunctional, anti-democratic institution that should probably be weakened if not gently discarded.

Once the filibuster is gone, work on campaign finance and disclosure laws to reduce the power of corporate threats and bribes. Do as much good work as possible while waiting for the older racists and misogynists to pass into the great beyond.

That would go a long way toward fixing what’s wrong with Washington.

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Rats overboard

by digby

Unless this is all an elaborate ruse and all these people know that there’s nothing in Mitt’s tax returns to give anyone pause, this sounds to me like a bunch of people who already pretty much know they are going to lose and are pre-emptively distancing themselves from the loser:

To politicos across the ideological spectrum, Romney’s unwillingness to release anything beyond these two years raises the question: if it’s worth the bad press to keep the tax returns private, they must contain something worse.
“The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” said conservative columnist George Will, on ABC’s “This Week.” “Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

On the ABC roundtable, Republican strategist Matthew Dowd had a similar take.

“There’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it,’” Dowd said. “So there’s obviously something there that compromises what he said in the past about something.”

“Many of these politicians think, ‘I can do this. I can get away with this. I don’t need to do this, because I’m going to say something and I don’t have to do this,’” Dowd said. “If he had 20 years of ‘great, clean, everything’s fine,’ it’d all be out there, but it’s arrogance.”

In the last week, several Republicans have advised Romney to release his returns. That list includes former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former RNC chairman Michael Steele and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who called for “total transparency” and said he releases all his tax returns. On “Fox News Sunday,” the Weekly Standard’s editor Bill Kristol added his voice to the list as well, calling for Romney to “release the tax returns tomorrow” and “take the hit for a day or two.”

I’m pretty sure that if Mitt loses it won’t be spun as being due to his career as a vulture capitalist. It will be because he was too moderate. But they have a while to let that marinate.

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The name’s Paw, T-Paw

by digby

What with Mitt’s inner wimp on display for all to see, there’s an awful lot of talk about a VP nod for Tim Pawlenty these days allegedly because he’s such a good attack dog.

I don’t know about that, but I do know that he’s muy, muy macho:

Oh baby. Plus there’s the “red-hot smokin’ wife.” I’m shocked they would even consider putting him on the ticket — his awesome manliness will just make Mitt look smaller by comparison.

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The Village’s beautiful and fragile glass house

by digby

Village media elder Steve Roberts is very upset with the blogosphere. It seems it’s been behaving very irresponsibly with this whole Condi Rice for VP rumor:

Former New York Times reporter Steve Roberts, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, is critical—like others who covered news in the non-digital age—of the principles that guide too many websites: “We’re not telling you this is true, we’re just saying other people are reporting it.” He calls the process “highly unethical.”

Oh yes, what could be worse than that? If only we could go back to the good old days when nobody ever did such things.

I can’t help but be reminded of something I like to call Cokie’s Law, after Steve Roberts wife. It comes from the Village maxim, “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there,” which was based upon this quote from Cokie Roberts back in 1999:

“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

In order to truly appreciate how depraved this was, you need to see the entire context:

Did Not! Did Too! Wanna Bet?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 5, 1999; Page C01

“His mother? His grandmother? . . . They’re the ones responsible for Bill Clinton’s bad behavior?” say Cokie and Steve Roberts. “Please!”

“Here we have her blaming the mother-in-law, essentially, for her husband’s philandering,” says Tony Blankley on CNN.

“Hillary Clinton should stop playing Dr. Laura,” says “Crossfire” co-host Bill Press.

Hold on! James Carville, the president’s pit-bull spinmeister, says the first lady never said what the media are ridiculing her for saying. And Carville is wagering $100,000 that he’s right.

He will put classified ads in Sunday’s New York Daily News and Washington Post, offering the six-figure sum “to any reporter who can show me that Hillary Clinton linked the president’s sexual misconduct with his childhood,” Carville said yesterday. The offer came after he consulted with White House strategists and Clinton allies who are increasingly worried about calming the summer squall.

“The press corps are savages,” Carville added. “This is the worst bull I’ve ever seen. People don’t know that she never said it. . . . You can’t misreport what she said.” At worst, said Carville, the first lady “alluded to these two things.”

Semantically speaking, Carville has a point. In the Talk magazine interview that triggered this week’s uproar, Clinton was speaking about her husband’s “sin of weakness” and how he “lied” to “protect” her. She also observed that the president “needs to be more responsible, more disciplined.”

In the next paragraph, writer Lucinda Franks said she mentioned having read about Bill Clinton’s chaotic childhood in his mother’s autobiography. “That’s only the half of it,” the first lady said. “He was so young, barely four, when he was scarred by abuse that he can’t even take it out and look at it. There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother. A psychologist once told me that for a boy being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one.”

That was it. The word “abuse,” in that context, fueled a media frenzy. And many journalists aren’t buying Carville’s she-never-said-it argument.

“I read the article closely–she seems to say that,” said ABC’s Cokie Roberts, who pens a syndicated column with her husband. “The whole tone and tenor is ‘poor baby. He had a rough time, it’s remarkable he’s turned out as well as he has, he has a weakness.’ “

Chris Matthews, host of CNBC’s “Hardball,” said that “Mrs. Clinton is trying to be candid” and “grapple with something very difficult,” but that “the White House big shots bigfooted her and said this psychological explanation is not going to work.” He said the White House had gone “back into cover-up mode,” a move that was “pushing this story into even higher levels of importance.”

“I’m on Hillary’s side,” said Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor” and usually a conservative critic of the Clintons. “I didn’t see the article as an attempt to excuse his behavior. . . . She was explaining why she stood by her husband.”

Why, then, did O’Reilly begin his Tuesday show by talking about “Hillary Clinton’s assertion that her husband’s upbringing is responsible for his irresponsible sexual behavior”? “That’s just a tease,” he said. “Basically, I was headlining what people were talking about.”

Back on the Senate campaign trail in New York yesterday, Clinton said the article’s message is that “everybody is responsible for their behavior,” but declined to discuss the topic further. That did little to quiet the debate, with MSNBC’s Linda Vester describing it as “a little post-revelation spin.”

Franks said Tuesday on “Larry King Live” that she thinks “it’s very clear that Hillary sees her husband’s childhood as influencing his behavior.” On Fox News Channel yesterday, though, Franks said people are misreading her piece and that the first lady “did not link his abuse to his infidelity.”

“But she put it out there for people to chew on,” countered anchor Paula Zahn.

Carville, for his part, says he will “name names” of journalists who misreported Clinton’s comments and invite them to sue him for the 100 grand. But he may be too late.

“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

You can see why they feel so strongly about preserving their journalistic ethics.

This went on for eight years, with Steve and Cokie among the very worst offenders. From Whitewater to “Chinagate” to the Lincoln Bedroom to Monica madness, it was non-stop unsubstantiated gossip masquerading as news. At the end of that run, Drudge was a big part of it. But he didn’t invent it. The so-called journalists of the political establishment were waaay ahead of him. They taught him the trade.

Update: Also too, Howie Kurtz, author of the above and here today:

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“You owe me”

by digby

Here’s Chris Hayes’ interview with Edward Conard in which he explains that Romney stayed on at Bain from 99-2002 because he was holding up his partners for as much as he could get.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Asked if Romney was driving a hard bargain during the negotiations, Conard said, “In part, yes, of course.” Romney legally remained the CEO and sole owner of Bain Capital until 2002, Conard added, because he was intensively negotiating his exit deal with the partners at the firm. Conard summed up Romney’s position this way: “’I created an incredibly valuable firm that’s making all you guys rich. You owe me.’ That’s the negotiation.”

I guess they must figure that’s a better way to explain it than having to answer why he would have been involved with a fetus disposal company.

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Whittling away at the taboos

by digby

Just as the open defense of torture during the Bush administration seems to have removed the taboo, I’m beginning to think that the Catholic Church’s child molestation scandal has done the same thing for pedophilia — at least to the degree important people are accused of it:

In January 2011, Joe Paterno learned prosecutors were investigating his longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for sexually assaulting young boys. Soon, Mr. Paterno had testified before a grand jury, and the rough outlines of what would become a giant scandal had been published in a local newspaper.

That same month, Mr. Paterno, the football coach at Penn State, began negotiating with his superiors to amend his contract, with the timing something of a surprise because the contract was not set to expire until the end of 2012, according to university documents and people with knowledge of the discussions. By August, Mr. Paterno and the university’s president, both of whom were by then embroiled in the Sandusky investigation, had reached an agreement.

Mr. Paterno was to be paid $3 million at the end of the 2011 season if he agreed it would be his last. Interest-free loans totaling $350,000 that the university had made to Mr. Paterno over the years would be forgiven as part of the retirement package. He would also have the use of the university’s private plane and a luxury box at Beaver Stadium for him and his family to use over the next 25 years.

The university’s full board of trustees was kept in the dark about the arrangement until November, when Mr. Sandusky was arrested and the contract arrangements, along with so much else at Penn State, were upended. Mr. Paterno was fired, two of the university’s top officials were indicted in connection with the scandal, and the trustees, who held Mr. Paterno’s financial fate in their hands, came under verbal assault from the coach’s angry supporters.

Board members who raised questions about whether the university ought to go forward with the payments were quickly shut down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the negotiations.

In the end, the board of trustees — bombarded with hate mail and threatened with a defamation lawsuit by Mr. Paterno’s family — gave the family virtually everything it wanted, with a package worth roughly $5.5 million. Documents show that the board even tossed in some extras that the family demanded, like the use of specialized hydrotherapy massage equipment for Mr. Paterno’s wife at the university’s Lasch Building, where Mr. Sandusky had molested a number of his victims.

And why not? Everyone knows that the Catholic Church hierarchy was aware of molestation in its ranks and covered it up for decades and yet the Church maintains its high social status. I know of few high profile people who believed such an immoral practice was a bridge too far for them and left the church over it. So really, why should anyone think that Joe Paterno and his friends would be shocked by this or think it was worth making a fuss over?

Sure nobody wants some seedy child molester running around in their neighborhoods. But in general, many in our society have decided somehow that institutional cover-ups of the crime are understandable. And lord knows, it shouldn’t stand in the way of an important person’s financial rewards. That’s serious business.

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Friendly Reminder: keep it simple

“I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

This is true, of course. And we can debate whether or not that’s a good thing for America in general. But it crashes headlong into Mitt’s “business” experience as a qualification for president.

I think the Obama campaign gets this:

“If you’re a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money,” Obama told CBS News. “It’s not to create jobs. It’s not even to create a successful business — it’s to make sure that you’re maximizing returns for your investor.”

Obama told Charlie Rose of CBS This Morning that private equity — which Romney practiced at Bain Capital — is “appropriate” work, “but that doesn’t necessarily make you qualified to think about the economy as a whole. Because, as president, my job is to think about the workers. My job is to think about communities, where jobs have been outsourced.”

Indeed. In fact, it’s a great opportunity to start pushing back in general on the idea that running the government is like running a business. (If we can persuade them to stop saying the government budget is like a typical household budget, we’ll really be getting somewhere.)

Update:

President Obama proudly channels Elizabeth Warren

by David Atkins

The great right wing circus is going apoplectic over this Obama speech:

Well, first of all, like I said, the only way you can pay for that — if you’re actually saying you’re bringing down the deficit — is to cut transportation, cut education, cut basic research, voucherize Medicare, and you’re still going to end up having to raise taxes on middle-class families to pay for this $5 trillion tax cut. That’s not a deficit reduction plan. That’s a deficit expansion plan…

But you know what, I’m not going to see us gut the investments that grow our economy to give tax breaks to me or Mr. Romney or folks who don’t need them. So I’m going to reduce the deficit in a balanced way. We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more. (Applause.) And, by the way, we’ve tried that before — a guy named Bill Clinton did it. We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together. (Applause.)

So all these issues go back to that first campaign that I talked about, because everything has to do with how do we help middle-class families, working people, strivers, doers — how do we help them succeed? How do we make sure that their hard work pays off? That’s what I’ve been thinking about the entire time I’ve been President.

Close readers will be reminded of this famous bit from Elizabeth Warren:

As a small business owner, I wholeheartedly agree with President Obama and future Senator Warren. Sure, I’ve worked hard to build a business and to stay afloat when many others in my profession have called it quits. But none of it would be possible without the framework of civilization that my taxes help to support. When I buy lunch, I depend on food safety regulators to make sure a corporation hasn’t tainted the ingredients. I depend on a national transportation infrastructure for business travel and for the shipping of necessities. I depend on the post office to deliver the mail. I depend on the government to assure the stability of the Internet through which I do the majority of my work. I depend on firefighters and police to protect my property, my safety and my community. I depend on educators to ensure that the American public remains educated and affluent enough to purchase products. I depend on the social safety net that ensures relative social stability, general prosperity and an absence of armed revolutionary warlords. My own education on full ride scholarship at a state university depended heavily on government assistance. And so on and so on.

Yes, I’ve worked hard to earn some modest success. But make no mistake: I haven’t built that. I merely stood on the shoulders of a vast network of civilization paid for by tax dollars, without which I would never have had the opportunity to succeed at all. Had I been born in Somalia or Burma, my fate would have been as dismal as the fates of most of my hypothetical compatriots.

To the right wing, the notion of collective responsibility and collective success is a dangerous idea. To the rest of us it’s just common sense.

I couldn’t be more thrilled that this argument is now the tip of the spear in our leaders’ political discourse, going straight to the heart of the Objectivist, parasitic vulture capitalist cabal. Fitting, that.

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Saturday Night at the Movies

Crimes and misdemeanors: Elena

By Dennis Hartley

Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
-Anthony Burgess

It quickly becomes apparent in the opening scenes of Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Elena that you are settling in to watch a film wherein nothing is going to quickly become apparent. He holds a static shot of a tree bathed in the cool light of dawn for what must be at least three minutes (an eternity in screen time). Aside from the cackling of crows, there doesn’t seem to be anything of particular significance going on. Wait a minute…is that a window, beyond the branches? It is, in fact, a balcony window, but we can’t quite see in; the glass only reflects the burgeoning sunrise. And (crows aside) it’s quiet…too quiet. This gives the viewer ample time to ponder a few questions: What’s going on behind that window? Are those crows supposed to be an omen? Are we about to be startled by something shockingly horrible that lies beyond the windowpanes?

Interior shots reveal a decidedly less sinister scenario; a well-appointed luxury apartment, where a plain, unassuming middle-aged woman shuts off her alarm and gets out of bed. Again, the director takes his time, carefully documenting all the minutiae of her morning ablutions. Just when we are about to assume she lives alone, she enters a different bedroom, drawing the curtains open to awaken a gentleman who is a number of years her senior. There is minimal verbal exchange between them. As she proceeds to head for the kitchen, where she diligently begins to prepare breakfast, new questions arise. Is she the man’s live-in housekeeper? Is she acting as caregiver for an elderly relative? As it turns out, while arguably a bit of both, she’s technically neither. Despite their undemonstrative behavior, they are married. Vladmir (Andrey Smirnov) is an aloof, well-do-do patrician, and Elena (Nadezhda Markina), a retired nurse, hails from a working class background.

Mundane breakfast chat reveals that Vladmir and Elena each have an adult child from previous marriages. Vladmir has a daughter, with who he is rarely in contact with. According to him, she is a self-centered “hedonist”, who “takes after her mother”. Still, however, he’s forever spoiled her; sending her money to support her party girl lifestyle. Much to Vladmir’s chagrin, Elena is off after breakfast to visit her son Sergei (Aleksey Rosen). Sergei, who is unemployed, relies on the money Elena funnels him from her monthly pension check to support himself, his wife, infant and teenage son. Vladmir, despite his wealth, refuses to give Elena’s son financial support; to him, Sergei is a useless lay about who needs to “get his ass off the couch” and start providing for his family. Elena, who has obviously heard this all before, absorbs his tirade with quiet resignation and then proceeds to take a long slog (in real time, seemingly) via bus, train and shoe leather express to just beyond the outskirts of urban renewal, where Sergei and his family live in a drab, rundown beehive apartment complex (which, with its twitchy gang members on the stoop and trashed, graffiti-scrawled lobby, is quite reminiscent of the building where Alex and his droogs held their confabs in A Clockwork Orange).

The stark contrast in living quarters, along with Vladmir and Elena’s “mixed marriage” of disparate social backgrounds become metaphors for the central themes of Zvyagintsev’s screenplay (co-written by Oleg Negin): classism, the chasm between the “haves” and the “have nots”, and ultimately, instinct vs. morality (this particular device carries echoes of Kurosawa’s class warfare noir, High and Low). Without giving too much away, these subtexts all come to the fore when Vladmir suffers a sudden heart attack. While in the hospital, he is visited by his estranged daughter (Elena Lyadova, in a brief but standout turn). Despite her nihilist stance regarding Vladmir’s situation, father and daughter have an unexpected reconciliation, inspiring Vladmir to make changes in his will. In turn, this decision leads one character to make a moral choice that profoundly changes the family’s dynamics (extended and otherwise). When this decision occurs, it is so subtle and reflexive that you might miss it if you blink; but such is the banality of evil.

Zvyagintsev has served up a complexly flavored filet of dark Russian soul, spiced with a hint of Dostoyevsky, a sprig of Burgess and a dash of Hitchcock. I suppose you could describe his film as a “noir-ish thriller”, but not in the traditional sense. There are no suspenseful musical cues. In fact, save for a solitary Philip Glass piece that makes several brief appearances on the soundtrack, there’s no music to speak of (thankfully, the director is astute enough to realize that a little bit of Philip Glass goes a long, long way). The deliberate pacing could be a deal-breaker for some; I’ll admit I found myself struggling a bit through the first hour or so. But if you are patient, you will come to realize that there is a Kubrickian precision to the construct. And you will finally grok what’s going on behind that window…it’s a primordial dance as old and familiar as human nature itself.

Previous posts with related themes:

The Housemaid/The Servant
Hipsters/The Women on the 6th Floor
Elles

Saturday Night at the Movies review archive