*** (out of ****)
Starring Stephen Rea, Donald Sutherland, Jeffrey DeMunn, Max von Sydow, Joss Ackland, Imelda Staunton, and John Wood.
Directed and written for the screen by Chris Gerolmo, from the book “The Killer Department” by Robert Cullen.
1995 (TV) R
“The Nazis feared the ‘murderers’ would be thinly veiled persons the audiences would recognize as Nazis. When they found I was concerning myself with mere child murderers, they said, ‘Oh, go right ahead, Herr Lang, go right ahead.’ The pigs.”
—German filmmaker Fritz Lang on his 1931 serial killer masterpiece “M.”
Murder seems to be the same the world over, and so are police procedurals. In “Citizen X,” set in the last decade of Soviet Russia, the angry captain asking for the detective’s badge is replaced by the secretary of ideology, and instead of a police department corrupted by bribery there is a department corrupted by apathy and the Communist party. The detective still suffers long lonely nights, estrangement from his family, and the psychological damage of pursuing a serial killer. “Citizen X” is a solid procedural, strengthened by its ability to draw connections between the investigation and the tragedy of communism, as well as a heart-wrenching performance by Stephen Rea as the hangdog detective broken by his investigation.
The title character of “Citizen X” is real-life serial killer Andrei Chikatilo (Jeffrey DeMunn), who has the undesirable distinction of being the world’s most prolific serial killer. The tragedy of Rea’s investigation into the dead children DeMunn leaves in fields and forests is that the Communist bureaucracy refuses all but the most minimal aid to the investigation. Serial murders, Rea is told, are a decadent Western phenomenon, and not to be found in the Soviet Union. Rea is forbidden from contacting the American FBI for advice, and funds cannot be found to supply him with computers or increased manpower. If a suspect is a Party member Rea is not allowed to hold him for long, and the officers he is given are calloused by what they perceive to be overwhelming indifference on behalf of their hierarchy. All the while children are turning up dead, and we begin to suspect that if DeMunn were murdering in the West he would have been caught before coming anywhere near a world record.
Despite these obstacles Rea wages on, for years, staking out the same train stations over and over again, where he suspects DeMunn is picking up the unsuspecting children. After more than thirty murders and five or six years on the case, Communism collapses, and the troublesome ministers are taken out of the way. After years on only one case, Rea learns that FBI agents investigating serial killings are required to rotate into different fields of crime every eighteen months to prevent psychic damage. Unkempt, slouching, and sad-eyed, Rea’s devotion is nonetheless able to inspire those around him. By the end of the film he has gathered an inner circle of officers who have lost their cynicism, chief of which is his superior (Donald Sutherland), who despite his outward calm is just as empathic as Rea. Sutherland, a career politician within the militia, teaches Rea how to manipulate the bureaucracy, while Rea rekindles Sutherland’s humanity.
DeMunn portrays Chikatilo as a man of supreme sexual, personal, and occupational inadequacies, avenging himself against the world by destroying what it holds most precious. He is a sad, pathetic man, not so much evil as immensely ill, and not at all intelligent. In the tradition of most serial killer films since “M,” we feel an iota or two of sympathy for DeMunn, mostly during his confession and the bawling shame it evokes from him. Max von Sydow makes a small but crucial appearance as the one psychiatrist willing to aid the investigation, and his almost fatherly interview with a captured DeMunn has the sad air of a confessional, in which von Sydow is simultaneously sympathetic and disgusted.
Director Chris Gerolmo (the screenwriter for “Mississippi Burning”) gives us glimpses of the crimes and their aftermaths that are sufficiently gruesome, but he refrains from the surgical excess of a more overblown film like “Hannibal” (2000). “Citizen X” is an HBO film and lacks the production values of a theatrical release, but its decrepit brick buildings and cold forests are convincing. Gerolmo’s direction is efficient and a half-step detached, and he shoots outdoors with the same drab greens and greys as “The Silence of the Lambs” (1990). Like an episode of the PBS series “Mystery!”, “Citizen X” does well on the small screen; it’s an important story, and an intimate one, but it might play awkwardly with the expectations of cinema, just as some big screen epics lose a bit of their magic on television.
In the end we are left with the gruesomeness of these murders and the heroism of a man willing to nearly destroy his own life in order to stop them. Rea’s adversary is not so much the killer, who is an inept, shameful, vicious little man, but the twisted ideology that has spurned indifference in those who should be helping the investigation. Perhaps the most moving scene in “Citizen X” is when Rea hears that, for years, FBI teachers have been describing him to students as the most tenacious investigator in the world. Rea weeps, his own life crippled, but his sense of justice stronger than ever.
P.S. In a tradition dating back to “Doctor Zhivago” and much earlier, the Russian characters speak English with Russian accents, while signs and poster use the Cyrillic alphabet. Nosy audiences, however, will notice that von Sydow’s essay on the serial killer is written in English.
Finished September 18th, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Friday & Saturday Night