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Eastern Promises
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: September 23, 2007

During his three-year cinematic stretch as the redeemer of humankind in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Viggo Mortensen managed to perfect a certain unique, messianic visage:  His character, Aragorn, seemed to pity his followers for believing in him. It was less a statement about the character’s personal inadequacies than it was a statement about the world, which had fallen so far into darkness as to place all its hope on a wandering ranger with a dubious but royal family history. That mournful look in Viggo’s eyes is one of the ingredients that elevated The Lord of the Rings to meet its own aspirations for profundity and relevance. 30 Academy Award nominations later, no one seemed to notice.

But Mortensen’s performance in the new film Eastern Promises will be harder to ignore. This time there are no special effects or epic battles to distract the audience from Viggo’s acting. In fact there are very few supporting characters or plot machinations at all. There is mostly just Viggo—menacing, often motionless, and subtly woeful as a mid-level Russian gangster caught in a moral quandary. The performance is spellbinding throughout, and finally topped off by an amazing sequence in which Mortensen, perhaps upping the ante from last year’s nude wrestling scene from Borat, fends off two knife wielding thugs in a bath house, all the while butt-naked, and with his apparatus flopping all over the tiles. It’s a vulnerable performance.

The film also stars a mostly underutilized Naomi Watts as Anna, a midwife at a London hospital who delivers the child of a dying 14-year old Russian immigrant, and in searching for the girl’s family, stumbles upon a Russian mob operation and their den of forced prostitution. Concurrent to and co-mingled with this plot is the story of the gangsters themselves, including a frighteningly charming Armen Mueller-Stahl as the kingpin Semyon, Vincent Cassel as the squirrelly heir Kirill, and Mortensen as Nikolai, a driver and clean-up man with ambitions to move up.

Eastern Promises is a quality movie, and a riveting one, but after seeing it I find myself keyed in mostly on its faults. This is probably because the film features a twist in the plot that undermines Nikolai’s dilemma and thereby negates a good deal of what the story establishes as its central drama. Even so, the twist might have worked if its own potential for drama had been explored. But Eastern Promises is one of the few films I’ve seen that would benefit from an extra hour of exposition. By the end there are so many loose ends and missing scenes, and so much unexamined back story, it feels almost like a prologue. What’s more, the dynamic among the three mobster leads, with Kirill in the role of the disappointing son and Nikolai serving as his surrogate, has been explored recently in The Road to Perdition and Gladiator. What Eastern Promises does choose to dramatize is, at times, a bit too familiar.

The director, David Cronenberg, is a more sober and mature artist than his contemporary, Brian DePalma, but the two men have a similar shortcoming: Both are able to craft brilliant, even iconic individual scenes. But frequently, their films, as a whole, fall somewhere short of excellence. For DePalma, the problem seems to be a disinterest in the moments that hold together his set pieces. For Cronenberg, it’s an unwillingness to stage his dramas in a larger context the viewer can recognize. Stories like Dead Ringers and A History of Violence would work perfectly as plays, in which the dialogue and character interactions would provide the bulk of the content, and the setting and other peripherals would be supplied largely by the viewer’s imagination. In films, though, this imbalance is rarely acceptable, and Eastern Promises provides a textbook example of why. The film is set in London, but there are almost no British characters. The mob operation apparently includes only five participants, including two old men and a half-wit kid. And the action takes place at only four or five locations. There is nothing inherently wrong with an intimate story of international human trafficking. But the fact is, Eastern Promises, despite its enthralling narrative, delivers a creeping sense of in-authenticity. It doesn’t do to shrink down the world to accommodate one’s plot.

All of that said, the bath house brawl is so intense, grisly, and (pardon the pun) ballsy, it’s going to earn this film a lot of love for years to come. And Mortensen’s performance in general is worthy of any attention this film ultimately receives. I give Eastern Promises a solid endorsement, basically in response to the brute force of its merits. But if you’re looking for something to ponder and not just something to watch, be prepared to grant or deny this film a lot of slack, because it’ll be your job to fill in some of the blanks.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld