Ben Kingsley on a Train

Ever since Sir Ben Kingsley symbolically murdered Gandhi with his villainous turn in Sexy Beast, he's become a fascinating screen baddie. He was recently a petty doper in The Wackness, and before that a very proper mobster in Lucky Number Slevin. Again he's a figure of menace on the periphery in Transsiberian, not a center of virtue. Instead, the good guy in this favorite little thriller from SIFF is played by Woody Harrelson--a Midwestern rube traveling by train across Russia after a church mission. Located in the moral murk between Kingsley's corrupt Russian cop and Harrelson's hick is Emily Mortimer. Harrelson, playing her adoring husband, sees only the good in her. But he's a fool. Kingsley, on the trail of stolen drugs, sees her as suspect. Who do you think is closer to the truth?

Out on DVD today, Brad Anderson's Transsiberian maintains its tension by the good old-fashioned movie device of trapping everyone aboard a moving train. Mortimer and Harrelson run afoul of drug smugglers, suitcases get switched, allegiances shift, adultery is considered...all of which leads to even more unpleasant stuff, including beatings, gunfire, and worse.

Mortimer, an English actress, has showed her chameleon range most notably in American roles, from Lovely & Amazing to 30 Rock. Her shutter constantly snapping as an amateur photographer, emphatically smoking (but never drinking) despite her husband's disapproval, she's a Woman With Secrets. This makes her equally useful to the drug smugglers and the drug seeker (i.e., Kingsley), though all underestimate the extent to which she'll conceal her dark past--and her present capacity to guard that history, violence included.

Director Anderson also put a malleable yet resourceful woman (Hope Davis) front and center in his 1998 breakthrough, Next Stop Wonderland. Mortimer, too, is looking for her place in the world: Does she belong with the decent, rather dumb Harrelson, or with the suave smuggler (Eduardo Noreiga)?

In a sense, Kingsley is on the sidelines, watching with us to see which way she leans. He's too smart to resort to threats or blood, at first, since Mortimer is such a captive specimen. (Even when the travelers get off the train, they're stuck in the middle of frozen Siberia; and the film's locations all look to be real.) As the cop tells the possible culprit, "There are few places one can hide in a train." There are also few places to hide, the movie suggests, in a marriage. And even fewer in a lie.

Transsiberian. First Look Studios, $28.98.