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.
