Transsiberian

Virtually the first English words you hear in the recent film Transsiberian come from a pastor leading a mission trip to minister to children in China. “Ours is not a gray world,” he says. “Under the bright light of truth,” he says, “it’s a world of clear contrasts: black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. There’s always a choice. With faith, the choice is an easy one.”

Listening with others, Roy (Woody Harrelson) smiles and nods.

As the credits roll, though, the opening words seem ironic.

At the end of the film, Roy’s wife Jessie is still withholding the terrible truth of what happened to her during their transsiberian train adventure. Abby, a young woman they befriended on the trip, takes a bundle of stolen money and walks away into the Siberian snowscape. The crooked Russian cop is still operating, though likely doomed from both sides.

Despite the stark Siberian landscape, it doesn’t look like a black-and-white world.

That would be a superficial grasp of the film, though. “There is always a choice,” and the characters who get in trouble do so because they make bad choices. As in Shakespearean tragedy, one evil choice cannot be undone, and consequences keep coming no matter what.

Plus, there is a black-and-white character, the hero – not protagonist – Roy (as in roi ), whose grinning Iowa goofiness is likely to mislead as much as the apparent moral murkiness of the film. WIth his ecstacies over trains (he has a train set at home in his basement) and his naive optimism, he seems childish.

Which is the point: His childish faith is what saves him and his wife. The pastor has it right: “Is it not in the face of a smiling child that we find the true wonder of God’s grace?” He could be describing Roy. It’s a world of Russia-doll deceptions, but at the heart of the Russian doll is a child.

(The film is compulsively watchable, largely because of the skillfully frustrated anticipation of crisis. You keep waiting for something dreadful to happen, and it keeps not happening. When it does, it is more dreadful than anything you imagined.)