TIFF Report: The Half Life of Timofey Berezin Review
Much like previous Section Eight production Syriana Scott Z. Bruns' The Half Life of Timofey Berezin is an issue based feature built at least as much in an attempt to educate as it is to entertain. With a stellar cast and a script that is generally very good despite the occasional lapse into high school physics teacher mode The Half Life of Timofey Berezin could have been a very strong picture balancing gangster comedy with a rich human heart and strong social conscience but, unfortunately, Burns the director just isn't up to the standards of Burns the writer, making one key decision right out of the gate the completely undercuts the entire film.
Stellar character actor Paddy Considine - a great fovaorite around these parts - stars as the titular Timofey Berezin, a technician at a Russian nuclear facility that generates weapons grade plutonium who is exposed to a massive dose of radiation in an accident at the plant. The exposure will certainly be fatal, most likely within just a few days, and with the plant refusing to assist Berezin and his young family - wife played by Radha Mitchell - the desperate man sets out to secure their financial future the only way he can: by stealing one hundred grams of plutonium and selling it on the Russian black market. In Moscow he meets Shiv, a horribly inept gangster completely unsuited for the criminal life, who has landed in deep trouble with his boss Tusk (Nicholaj Lie Kaas) when his extortion tactics hit the wrong business thanks to a colleague (Jason Flemyng) misreading the address. Shiv has seventy two hours to repay the damages so that Tusk can avoid a gang war or else he will himself be offered up as a sacrifice.
An interesting premise with a fantastic cast, so what went wrong? There are some pacing problems and a bit of a tendency to have Berezin lecture people on the scientific properties of plutonium - as though telling us that there are quantities of weapons grade plutonium floating around out there isn't enough to alarm without a physics lesson to back it up - but these are relatively minor problems in the general scheme of things. The big issue is Burns' decision to make the entire cast speak in accent.
What is Burns thinking? If he was aiming for authenticity then why is there not a single Russian actor in this entirely Russian set piece? There is not a single one, not even in support roles. Further, he openly acknowledges that because of the international nature of the cast and the range of natural accents not everyone was able to do a convincing Russian accent, so rather than having a range of accents Burns opted to have them all use some sort of made up, mutt accent that is not actually Russian or anything else in reality, but seemed close enough and was something that the entire cast could do within a reasonable range of similarity. So whatever it may be, authentic it very clearly is not.
If you're going to get the accents wrong no matter what, then the obvious question becomes why do them at all? Though none of these actors are what you'd call A-list, they are all quite recognizable and all obviously not Russian. By forcing them into a completely unnatural mode of speaking, one that is completely artificial and does nothing but distract from the rest of the performances, Burns immediately breaks the illusion of his own film. You just cannot buy into a world that claims to be based in reality while being so obviously and thoroughly artificial and false. Burns has assembled a truly stellar cast but with this one decision he has handcuffed every single one of them before they ever stepped in front of the camera. The performances suffer greatly and Burns would have been far, far better off to simply let everyone speak in their natural voices and simply focus on the emotional core of the characters.
The Half Life of Timofey Berezin has all the basic ingredients to make for a quality little film. Unfortunately it fails.
