Eastern Promises (2007)
First, let me answer the question that all of you really want to know. Yes, Viggo Mortensen shows his nuts in a fight scene of staggering brutality. Was that the question? Maybe you actually wanted to know if the new David Cronenberg film was actually any good?
For the moment, and I’m reserving the right to change my mind down the road, I’m marking pretty good on my Eastern Promises ballot. It’s clear now after seeing the film what drew Cronenberg to the material, but I’m a little more curious as to why he settled for this particular script. Steven Knight, the screenwriter, also penned Dirty Pretty Things, a film that I found obvious and boring, and more than a little draped in un-fun, un-scary, un-perverse Oscar prestige. Nothing lowers the stakes of a thriller faster than delusions of the Golden Man.
Eastern Promises is a more effective and memorable film than Dirty Pretty Things, and that’s because Cronenberg injects the material with a kinky subtext of unchecked evil. The diary that Naomi’s Watt’s midwife, Anna, finds here is a bit like the ear in Blue Velvet, a naive hero’s passport to the id.
Lynch’s hero was, like many of us would or hope we would be, tempted by the pleasures of the underneath. We don’t have so much luck with Naomi Watts, I’m afraid. That’s a shame too, because Watts is one of the most unaffected, artifice free actresses working in the movies today.
The contrast between Anna’s personality (haunted, conservative) and wardrobe (tight leather jacket and jeans), seems to promise an object of erotic confusion that the film’s script doesn’t quite have the imagination for. Watts has proved, in Mulholland Drive, that she has the good girl lured by the bad in her, but here she’s Mrs. McGuffin, and its a testament to Watts’ talent that she brings it off as well as she does.
Viggo Mortensen, who previously teamed with Cronenberg in A History of Violence, gets to have all of the fun, and its the actor’s best work. His Nikolai, who with those shades looks uncannily like Ed Harris in Violence, is the film’s central mystery, an inverse of the his Tom Stall in Violence. I won’t comment on the extent of the two characters’ parallels, but I will say that Mortensen is an iconic figure of quiet, slow burn menace here. Mortensen never makes the mistake of trying to be a badass, which is of course the wussiest thing a would be badass could do.
Eastern Promises is structurally interesting in that the majority of the plot’s running time is dominated by a red herring. The film’s true interest remains at the sidelines, and we are forced to leave this world much sooner than tradtional films condition us to expect. Yes, Cronenberg pulls the fade to black three beats sooner than you expect gambit here, only much more is left in the open this time, and its a daringly perverse anti-climax. It’s thriller blue balls, the foreground heroes get what they want while the background schemesters ensure that the world remains a shitty place anyway.
There are other Cronenberg niches to be explored here: the tattoos, the shady not quite defined transactions on the sidelines, the seductive rot of night time London. All of this is impressive, and the first hour of Eastern Promises is confident and intriguing. The disappointment is that Cronenberg’s craftsmanship has been recruited to serve an underwhelming script. The plot points are obvious, and a third act surprise is an infuriatingly conventional bust.
See the film. It’s an interesting example of what a very talented, personal filmmaker brings to outside material, and its richly executed, but its, especially for a director of Cronenberg’s skill, not quite enough.
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