A young, female
foreigner (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) walks into a London pharmacy,
noticeably in pain and crying out for help. Seconds later, she
falls to the floor, blood flowing from her body to her feet. The
girl is rushed to the hospital, where she dies in the process of
giving birth to a premature baby girl. No one comes looking for
the girl (or her newborn); she is left unidentified with only a
diary written in Russian to clue the hospital into whom she
might be.
Anna (Naomi
Watts), the midwife who delivered the girl’s baby, sees the
moral need to find the baby’s family. Skimming through the pages
of the diary of the deceased, whose name she discovers was
Tatiana, Anna finds a business card for a Trans-Siberian
restaurant. Anna pays a visit to the manager of the restaurant,
Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who claims he doesn’t know
anything of Tatiana but offers to translate the diary’s Russian
text to help out. What Anna doesn’t know is that Semyon is
actually the head of a Russian mob that used Tatiana for sex,
and plans to translate the diary inaccurately in order to cover
up the truth. Also prominent in the picture is the mob’s driver,
Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who Anna views as strangely alluring.
Eastern
Promises contains a fairly conventional mob-story and was
done in a style rather typical of director David Cronenberg, but
the fusion of these two familiar elements results in a
surprisingly original film. The tonal darkness and thematic
exploration of violence accomplished by Cronenberg’s directorial
approach provide the morality-play that Semyon’s mob engages in
a much-needed sense of depth. As was the case with Francis Ford
Coppola’s infamous The Godfather, Eastern Promises
never fails to recognize the confused motivations and
charismatic presences of its morally repugnant thugs of
characters.
The
effectiveness of Cronenberg’s trademark style doesn’t only
enhance Eastern Promises’ ability to understand its
characters on a psychological level, but also allows them to act
far more realistically in the film than they would have at the
hand of another director. Cronenberg fearlessly invites brutal
amounts of realistic violence into his frames: fingers are cut
off and throats are slit. Most shocking of all sequences in the
film is a sauna-staged knife-fight between Nikolai and men from
a rival mob.
Many have
criticized several of the casting-decisions for the film, but I
am willing to ardently defend every performance in it. The most
controversial selection is Naomi Watts as Anna; many think the
actress is too “pretty” for the role. I would argue that Watts’
considerable cosmopolitan qualities allow her to evoke the
audience’s sympathies easily, yielding her a natural and strong
protagonist. These personality characteristics make her
exchanges with Mortensen, utterly brilliant here, all the more
effective, especially after a startling plot-twist regarding his
character is revealed.
An effective
character-study and a wholly entertaining mob-movie, Eastern
Promises will satisfy all viewers who aren’t put off by its
high level of gruesomeness. Successfully coupling Cronenberg’s
brooding style with uniformly excellent performances from the
cast, it stands as one of the fall season’s finest offerings
thus far.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 9.24.2007
Screened on:
9.21.2007 at the Edwards San Marcos 18 in San Marcos, CA.
Eastern Promises is rated R and runs
100
minutes.
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