Almost Holy

Almost Holy

“I want to cleanse my soul after this story,” Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko says in “Almost Holy.” This is after we hear about a deaf Ukrainian teenager whose adult housemate spent years sexually abusing her, impregnating her once and taking the baby away to parts unknown. She’s at the Pilgrim Republic rehab center, an organization run by Mokhnenko to get children off the street and off drugs. In sign language, she asks over and over again if he can find her daughter and bring her back. He promises to try. He also goes to confront the abuser, using language that is appropriate but shocking to hear from a preacher.

But Pastor Gennadiy, or Crocodile Gennadiy as he calls himself, is not just a man of God. He’s a celebrity in Ukraine, where his tough love activism is both controversial and celebrated. Sometimes his methods for helping young heroin-addicted street kids veer close to kidnapping. “Almost Holy” introduces us to some of these kids, including the eight that Mokhnenko added to his family of three; as well as Pilgrim workers who were saved by its founder and are now paying it forward by helping out and counseling.

“Almost Holy” shows Crocodile Gennadiy at work, taking us underground into the sewers and onto the mean streets of Mariupol in Ukraine. Some of what we see is awful but it never feels exploitative or like poverty porn as in “Trash” or “Slumdog Millionaire.” Steve Hoover directs with a steady naturalistic hand aided by Atticus Ross’ unobtrusive score (“The Social Network”) he never tips how we’re supposed to feel about any of this; nor does it make us think of these people any more as others than they already seem so strange to those living comfortable lives elsewhere.

It helps that “Almost Holy” presents this as a series of stories told by Crocodile Gennadiy during a speaking engagement at a women’s penitentiary. We’re flies on the wall, meant to listen and learn rather than pity and feel superior.

Mokhnenko explains that his “Crocodile” nickname comes not from Paul Hogan but from a Soviet cartoon with a crocodile character who shares both his name and his penchant for helping people. The crocodile’s sidekick is a dog with a coif straight out of a Bronner Brothers hair show. Mokhnenko’s cartoon alter ego pops up occasionally in animated interludes, usually being antagonized by a mean old lady who has definitely read Ayn Rand.

These moments are playfully used, welcome respites from an unrelenting cold harshness; if only things were so easy for the real Crocodile Gennadiy as they appear to be for his cartoon doppelgänger.

“Almost Holy” is broken down into three time periods 2000-2008; 2008-2012; now charting Ukraine’s shifting political and social state up through Putin, Crimea and its current unrest. As the protests get closer to Mariupol, the movie cuts back and forth between this fight to save Ukraine with Crocodile Gennadiy’s ongoing mission to save its children.

While the majority of “Almost Holy” (a scene of his shadow cast against a sky filled with fireworks is like a comic book panel) does not hold its humble hero up higher than necessary, it does treat everyone else with more dignity than you might expect. This means the kids who are going through withdrawal and the enigmatic woman who sells them the opiate drugs that hook them. The film is shrouded in her mystery; she becomes a metaphor for the problem.

Terrence Malick is one of the producers of “Almost Holy,” and though Hoover doesn’t go for a full-on realization/interpretation of Malick’s style, there are touches that recall the filmmaker, particularly in the movie’s final sequence. (The last shot that lingers is pure Malick.) As water does in “The Tree of Life,” water has a significant visual presence here, and there are contemplative shots of religious imagery that hang onscreen while Mokhnenko narrates on the soundtrack.

There are no easy answers in “Almost Holy,” which also doesn’t mess around by promising happy endings for Crocodile Gennadiy’s clients. Even he admits, with some stoicism, to a high rate of failure because many things are out of his control. People will do what they think is best for them even if it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean you don’t help anyway. To these filmmakers, Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko is something like a superhero. I found myself leaning that way too.

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