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A history of promises

David Cronenberg's latest is mobbed by flaws
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 16th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Rushing to a conclusion. Cassel, Mortensen and Watts in Cronenberg's film.
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Eastern Promises

Directed by David Cronenberg
With Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Sinead Cusack and Jerzy Skolimowski

Director David Cronenberg has famously been dubbed the “king of venereal horror,” a title that he effortlessly maintains. But he’s also the master anthropologist of claustrophobic subcultures, of people operating in the darker niches of the wider world, whether confined (and defined) by madness (Spider), transgressive sexual appetites (Crash) or creative genius (Naked Lunch).
Lately, the Canadian director has been interested in crime, punishment and redemption, though his characters’ lives are no less marginal. Even in his current film, Eastern Promises, a story of the Russian mob in London, his people could be living in a minor, if violent, town in Siberia rather than in one of the globe’s largest metropolises, so banished are the city’s teeming millions from their consciousness (and ours — London has never seemed so depopulated).
This narrow field of vision is a fine focusing device. And audiences, as always, will feel uncomfortably caged in with Cronenberg’s creatures, many of whom are as vicious as they are soulless. There will be blood.
Eastern Promises shares much with Cronenberg’s last film, A History of Violence, including some of that film’s flaws. It’s a tough, ruthless investigation of how the bloodiness of organized crime can suddenly swamp the lives of strangers who have strayed too close to its corners. As with one of Cronenberg’s spouting, punctured jugulars, if you poke around in the wrong place, all the toxins and terrors contained within some basement society will splatter you.
Vor v zakone, a particularly fierce Russian mob, has colonized a section of London. The tattooed thugs of the Vor v zakone specialize, as most mobs do (and they have many competitors here), in drugs, prostitution and weaponry. But the Vor remain invisible to anyone outside of their orbit, even when they are running businesses that serve as fronts.
It will be one of these fronts, though, that will suddenly enclose around a young nurse named Anna (Naomi Watts) when she stumbles inside looking for clues to the identity of a teenage Russian girl who died in Anna’s hospital while giving birth. All that Anna has to go on is a diary that the girl kept in Russian, and a business card to a fancy restaurant in Farringdon owned by the avuncular Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl).
To say more about the plot risks ruining it, as Eastern Promises’ people are not always what they appear to be. That said, there are surprising lapses that border on the inept in some of the characters’ development, where the director allows his actors to telegraph far too much of their “inner truth,” thus making the film not as shocking and suspenseful as it could have been (Mueller-Stahl’s patriarch being the prime example).
This very same caricatural approach to his characters lessened A History of Violence’s impact as well. Cronenberg has a cruel, dark wit, which he vigorously employs in Promises. Yet in placing his action firmly within the tough realities of contemporary London (something the director’s scriptwriter, Steven Knight of Dirty Pretty Things, knows thoroughly), rather than, say, in a schizophrenic’s skull or a sweat-dank Interzone hotel, Cronenberg needs more than mordant, two-dimensional drawings of people.
However, the director has a good, solid cast, headed by A History of Violence’s Viggo Mortensen, who puts in terrific and terrifying work as the Vor clean-up man, Nikolai. Unblinking, chiseled-jawed and with hair slicked back like a lethal Gordon Gekko, Mortensen seems to haunt the edge of each frame of Promises. He also commands the scene that will be this film’s signature for years: a fight to grisly death in a Turkish sauna.
Watts does much with what little she’s given, as does Vincent Cassel as a Vor commander. The other innocents to be snared in the Vor web with Anna will be her mother (played a tad too dramatically by Sinead Cusack) and her uncle (the great one-man Polish film studio, Jerzy Skolimowski).
There’s much to appreciate in Cronenberg’s film (though I remain more of a Spider and eXistenZ fan). But, ultimately, Eastern Promises promises more than it delivers.
 

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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