Eastern Promises

***
USA

On the level of campy fun, David Cronenberg's blood-and-entrail-laden foray into murky Russian mafia transactions in London's underworld works perfectly well. Except then you're asked to accept for human-like characters the sadistic brutes who, for commercial purposes, spik to each odder in hevily akcented Inglish and kan even temporarily survive being stabbed through the heart. Not to mention the dead teenage mother, who reads out [again, in Slavic-inflected English] voiceover pages and pages of seemple-Rrrussian-girl dreams and expositori backstory from her diary (all to the accompaniment of the world's whiniest violin). On this level of projected human drama, the whole thing amounts to one dumb joke.
(And is a single one of the actors genuinely Russian?)

Once in a while I understand what good actors bring to a movie. It’s usually mediocrity that sounds it out. When a good actor is given a script that’s nothing much and a group of co-stars who are either miscast or woefully inadequate, it’s as if adversity acts as a lightning rod; think of Antony Hopkins in Meet Joe Black or Marlon Brando in anything after 1972. Johnny Depp is a master of turning cinematic lead into acting gold. Now Viggo Mortensen must be added to these somewhat dubiously-honoured ranks. Viggo’s new movie, Eastern Promises, is mediocre to the bone, but his performance, as a Russian mobster, is among the best acting of the year.

Eastern Promises tells a story straight out of Charles Dickens: A pregnant Russian girl dies giving birth in a London hospital. She leaves behind a diary. Kindly nurse Naomi Watts finds a business card tucked inside the diary and decides to track down any family the dead Russian girl might have left behind. Traipsing into danger without much thought for own personal safety, Watts finds the restaurant listed on the business card and with it… the Russian Mafia. The remainder of the movie finds Watts appealing to the conscience of the same gangsters who raped and murdered a 14-year-old, and Viggo Mortensen politely trying to stop Watts from getting killed.

Ninety per cent of this movie is crap. So why give it a pass? The script is hackneyed, the casting spotty (Vincent Cassel – possibly the most French-looking French actor who ever lived – plays a Russian gangster); David Cronenberg’s direction (save the sauna fight) is blandly pedestrian. The movie was co-funded by BBC Films and it certainly sticks by the BBC Films credo: make nothing anyone would want to watch. But then there’s Viggo. And he really is that good. He’s so good in fact that I think I need to spend another paragraph on what’s bad just so you can appreciate how good his acting is.

Naomi Watts looks like she’s waiting for the lights to change for most of this movie, and small wonder – her character sucks. Anyone who’s ever known a nurse knows that –short of Russian mobsters – there’s scarcely a more hardened, been-there, unshockable breed in Christendom than the average Casualty nurse. And yet here’s Watts, in 2007, playing the voice of moral outrage and acting shocked that the Russian Mafia are – golly! – bad people. It’s not that the movie doesn’t earn the right to moral outrage, but the mouthpiece we get seems… naïve. Similarly Vincent Cassel – not only is he French as hors d’œuvre, his character as-written doesn’t make sense either. Cassel plays the son of the chief Russian mobster. We know he’s meant to be a buffoon because he shows up drunk in every scene. But there’s nothing else to him. He cackles, he gurns, he does his Moscow-a la Amelie accent, but he’s never anything more than the oblivious idiot who sets the plot in motion.

Viggo Mortensen enters the movie like a shark’s fin – black and sleek and portentous of something deadly. He looks authentic. Something about his face speaks of experience in street fights. Even before we see his tattoos, we’ve seen where they come from. He looks at Watts and it’s a shark looking at a minnow. When he looks at anyone all you see is how little they’ve seen of the world in contrast to him. The fast-becoming-infamous fight scene in a sauna – where Viggo takes on two hoods naked – is only sold to us off the back of Mortensen’s performance. Where other actors play Russian by way of vodka and vocal inflections, Viggo plays Russian as a state of mind, that great mix of boisterousness and stoicism that defines Russian men. It’s there in the scene where he puts a cigarette out on his tongue: playful, mad, toughened, un-American.

Can good acting save a mediocre movie? No – because a movie is never more or less than the sum of its parts. Eastern Promises doesn’t have the script it needs to be the Goodfellas of the Russian Mafia. There are too many short cuts taken, too many characters who aren’t worth our time. When Viggo is on screen, we’re watching a movie about loyalty and barbarism. He cuts to the heart of a man of violence. But the movie doesn’t deserve him. This is a movie with a Message and a happy ending. We need to be knee-deep in blood and instead we’re plucking babies from the Thames. Viggo’s shark is left at sea.

BACK COVER SYNOPSIS: Every sin leaves a mark. Set primarily in London's Russian community, Eastern Promises stars Naomi Watts (21 Grams) as Anna Khritrova, a midwife born to a Russian father and an English mother. She is on duty one night when a pregnant teenager is brought in haemorrhaging and, after giving birth, dies on the operating table. No one knows the girl's identity but she has left a diary, in Russian, and a business card for a restaurant. With these clues, Anna sets out on a quest to find out the young girl's identity and next of kin. She meets the owner of the restaurant, the seemingly amiable Semyon, who, unbeknownst to her, is a powerful underworld figure. As part of the murderous Russian mafia, Semyon immediately recognises the diary for what it is - a threat to himself and his empire. When Anna refuses to hand the diary over to him, Semyon calls on his henchman, Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen - Lord of the Rings), to resolve the problem and in doing so, unleashes the full fury of the Vory... Orchestrated in an inescapable atmosphere of danger and dread, Eastern Promises is a startling, sometimes gruesome, totally intriguing thriller from one of Hollywood's finest, David Cronenberg (Crash, A History Of Violence).

FILM REVIEW: Aside from knowing this was a Cronenberg film going in (and thus knowing a little bit of what to expect), my first indication of what this film was about was from the back-cover synopsis and I have to say that it's somewhat misleading. Although this film starts off with Watts' character Anna entering in to a mystery surrounding a Russian girl who dies during child birth but leaves an inflammatory diary about a Russian mob leader, the film quickly segues to Viggo Mortensen's character Nikolai, and it's really his film and his story. Not that this is a bad thing and in fact Mortensen puts in a stellar performance with a pitch-perfect Russian accent. This is a strong mystery-thriller with great characters, and being a Cronenberg film, a couple of moments of no-holds-barred gore. Some of the film is a little off-centre however, particularly with the story to do with Anna's relevance to the plot. She is introduced as important but over the course of the film she really becomes less important, to the point where you would rather be watching the in-fighting and interactions with Nikolai and the Russian mobmen (which in fact is what ends up happening during the second half of the film - a sort of Russian 'Godfather'). This makes for a film that takes a while to find its way and appears to be getting pulled in different directions; Cronenberg for the most part makes it work but it does have an inconsistent quality to it.
The film starts with an execution; Kirill (Vincent Cassel) urges an underling in the mob to slit the throat of the victim as a test. We then proceed to see him slice in to the victim's throat like he's carving up a roast, with several slices across the neck for good measure (this is a Cronenberg film remember?). The film then moves to a girl who walks in to a pharmacy pleading for help by the pharmacist who thinks she's there for drugs but recoils in horror when she collapses to the ground, bleeding like a torrential river. Anna enters the picture as the midwife who delivers the baby and it is here where the plot really starts with Anna wanting to find out the girl's identity and the baby she just delivered through the diary she has left behind in her belongings. This takes her to the seemingly nice Semyon (a rather excellent Armin Mueller-Stahl) who is actually a mob leader is the Russian community in London. Through her interactions, she encounters his driver, Nikolai (Mortensen), and they develop an unusual bond. Nikolai seems to have a good heart but he's a mob man. Anna tries to appeal to Nikolai's good side, but the story then focuses more on Nikolai and his interactions with Semyon and Kirill, leading to the surprising revelation at the end that Nikolai is actually an undercover cop working to undermine the mob.
Viggo Mortensen really carries this film well. He has such gravity in his performance, drawing you towards the screen with his nice, but tough guy character in Nikolai. He gets most of the scenes in the film, and he's involved in some very nasty and violent stuff as well, particularly when he is attacked in a sauna and has to fight back while still naked and getting gauged by the hitmen's curved knives. Naomi Watts is not quite right as Anna; she does a decent job but I think I heard the Aussie accent come through a few times, and her English accent didn't seem quite right. Armin Mueller-Stahl is excellent as the mob leader; he carefully balances the nice guy front with the savage and cowardly inside to his character. Vincent Cassel does a good job as Kirill, but his character is annoying; he's the nutty, unpredictable, crazy mob guy who seems to be trying to get his father's approval but doesn't ever get it. It's interesting to note here that none of the actors playing the 'Russian' mob men are actually Russian.
One of the most fascinating ideas presented in the film is that tattoes on each of the mafia men. The tattoos are like a permanent record of where they've been, what they've done, and how experienced they are. Each tattoo is a right of passage, and if you don't have certain tattoos, you can't be accepted to certain levels within the organisation. And if you put a tattoo on your skin you didn't earn, then the mob guys come around and have it 'cut out' of your skin while you watch. Nikolai is covered in tattoos, and he quickly moves up the ranks as being someone of value, but Semyon tricks him in to getting the star tattoos, which are almost a birthright as a way to make Semyon's rivals believe he's actually Kirill when they try to kill him. In the end, Semyon's treachery comes back to bite him when it is revealed that he in fact raped the girl who Anna is so interested in and the baby is Semyon's daughter.
The film's only real problem is it's through-line, seeming to have different directions it could go in. Is it Anna's quest to find out the mystery of the girl who died while giving birth? Is is Nikolai's story and his quest to either ascend the ranks of the mob, or to be the undercover policeman undermining them? Is it Semyon's story about his evil handling of the girl in the question? They all have complementary elements that could work together but for some reason they are not told side by side but rather jumping to one after another (or at least it seems that way, especially the way the film starts). If the filmmakers had tied these stories together better it would have been more powerful as the source material was quite strong.
I'd say "A History Of Violence" was better, but "Eastern Promises" is a decent Cronenberg film that offers an intriguing mystery plot and some great performances, if not an entirely consistent story.

TECHNICAL REVIEW: The video transfer is great; the picture looks good throughout the running time, always clear, crisp with colours represented faithfully and without film or mpeg artefacts. The soundtrack is likewise great, and although is quiet for much of the running time, there are a few moments that utilise the surround sound system (particularly Cronenberg's trademark violent scenes) which will probably make you jump out of your seat. Overall, an excellent transfer.

EXTRAS REVIEW: There are two featurettes on this disc which comprise the extras package. The first is called "Secrets and Stories" and covers the making of the film; although short (about 10 minutes), it's quite informative and offers some quality interviews with director Cronenberg and the cast. The second featurette is called "Marked For Life" and is only five minutes but covers some of the history of the Russian community and mafia presence in London. Both make for good viewing. There is also an English subtitle track. Overall, it's a nice couple of extras but not particularly extensive.

BOTTOM LINE: Rent it.

FILM RATING: 7.5/10 -- EXTRAS RATING: 6.5/10 -- OVERALL DVD RATING: 7/10 

Todd Murphy <br />
http://www.allaboutmovies.net

Last updated: 2010-02-08 23:52:28 by user01