Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/27/07
With the passing of the Toronto
Film Festival, the nature of moviegoing hype changes for the six month
Oscar Season. After a summer of letting marketers and trailer editors
tell us what movies we MUST see, now it's time to let buzzmeisters (both
critics and reporters who tell us how much some movies look like critics
should love them) take over. The funny thing is, I've never found
one group to be more reliable than the other when it comes to heralding
what's actually going to amaze me beyond all measure. Case in point:
Toronto Audience Award Winner Eastern Promises, the recipient of
some of the year's ravest reviews. It's a good movie, a competently
diverting crime thriller directed with consummate skill and sporting one
really good performance, but any resemblance to the groundbreaking slicing
of bread is purely coincidental.
A teenage girl enters a London
pharmacy with blood running down her legs and collapses. She's rushed
to a nearby hospital where she gives birth... and dies. Identifying
her and finding a family for her newborn daughter becomes an obsession
for midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), who recently suffered a miscarriage.
She finds the girl's diary among her things, but it's in Russian.
Anna's of Russian descent, but doesn't speak the language herself.
Undaunted, she follows a business card in the diary to a restaurant owned
by entrepreneur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who in a whirlwind of insistent
friendliness is soon translating a copy of the diary himself. Alas,
it tells the story of how young Tatiana (voice of Tatiana Maslany) was
lured from her poor village to England with false promises of a job as
a singer, only to end up as a prostitute in the employ... of Semyon, who
is in reality the Boss of a Russian crime family terrorizing the city.
Rising through the ranks of his organization is Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen),
a driver with numerous shady skills and the trust of Semyon's unbalanced
son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Nikolai is drawn to Anna and tries to
protect her and her family even as he looks out for his own interests.
But the higher he climbs, the more of Semyon's trust he acquires, the greater
the danger for everyone.
Eastern Promises marks
a continuation of the career reinvention noted horror director David Cronenberg
(The Fly) began with A History of Violence, and reunites
him with that film's star, Mortensen. It benefits mightily from Cronenberg's
skill at organically weaving violent and sexual imagery into the worlds
of his films rather than simply carting it out to make cameos as most directors
do. It's hard to think of a movie that does such a good job of portraying
the soul-crushing depravity of organized crime without even breaking a
sweat. And the much-ballyhooed fight scene between a naked Nikolai
and two fully clothed goons is a marvel of action choreography and star
courage (just imagine the DVD caps that'll be following Mortensen around
the Internet for the rest of his life!) that's hard to imagine coming from
any other filmmaker. The violence is off-the-charts (I'd never before
considered how politely improbably it is that all movie throat-slashings
occur in one smooth motion before watching the far more realistic one that
opens this film), but it really feels like it belongs, and when Cronenberg's
characters have sex, it's not THAT they're having it that matters, but
HOW. Under his direction, Mortensen is once again tremendous, sporting
a totally authentic accent that's maybe 5% too thick to always be understood,
but sells him as a Russian to a degree I'd never have believed possible
when seeing the trailer. And I never doubted any of his deadly skills,
or his criminal background, for a second. Kudos must also go to the
makeup artists who created his imposing and totally lived-in collection
of prison tattoos.
Unfortunately, the casual
heartlessness that serves Eastern Promises so well in the background
also extends to the foreground. While it's interesting to watch what
Anna, Nikolai and Semyon DO, none of them is ever as engaging as a character
(more on this under the spoiler warning) as one might hope. Mueller-Stahl
alternates fatherly affection and volcanic rage as only he can and Watts
is steadfast and true, but the movie never really lets us see the wheels
turning inside their heads. It's only the high level of craft that
keeps Steven Knight's screenplay from being unmasked as the naked, baby-endangering
melodrama that it is.
**SPOILER WARNING**
Even beyond the melodrama,
Knight's script builds to an interesting but ill-advised reversal late
in the game that casts a chilly pall of decisiveness over a story that
had seemed far more complex. If Nikolai is a man who's chosen a criminal
life but who tries to balance his dark deeds with good ones where he can,
he's a truly fascinating character. If, instead, he's what he turns
out to be, then he's just another movie action hero. While the film
plays at ambiguous characters and motivations throughout, once it's all
said and done, every last person in it is either a white hat or a black
hat. For me, at least, that was a really deflating turn of events.
**END OF SPOILERS**
Eastern Promises is
a pretty good thriller with great atmosphere, but those seeking the next
great organized crime epic should look elsewhere (for one thing, it's hard
to be epic in a crisp 100 minutes). It's never as good as the extraordinary
first hour of A History of Violence, but it does share that movie's
need to lose its' way as it goes. David Cronenberg continues to put
an inimitable directorial stamp on genre fare; I just wish he'd do it with
more fully realized screenplays. But, what do I know: it seemed
to play pretty well in Toronto. |
