More Fortitude than a Repentant Christian Wife Beater
With his quiet Russian mafiaso drama, Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg waltzes atop film snobs
image courtesy of Focus Features
By Jesse Bullington Depending on who you listen to, Eastern Promises either has too much David Cronenberg in it or not enough—as if the director adds quantified secretion of his own essence to the films he makes. The fallacy with these two arguments is almost a purely philosophical problem and barely worth addressing here. Cronenberg has sold out and Eastern Promises is mainstream drivel one camp crows, while the equally pig-ignorant haters at the opposite pole harp on about his choice of explicit violence and cite a refusal to abandon his roots in genre. All they agree upon is that clearly, Cronenberg is to blame. What do the opinions of supposedly open-minded film buffs truly matter, however, when they display this inability to distance a film from its director, and therefore his earlier works? Is Eastern Promises a Cronenberg film in the classical sense, or neo-classical? Literally or metaphorically? It’s the exact sort of trash that always makes me want to hunt down critics and inject them with the Ebola virus. Frankly, when a director makes over a dozen movies and only one bores or frustrates me (Crash—how is Ballard and Cronenberg not an amazing combo? I should probably re-watch it lest I missed something) I lose the ability to get pissy over his visits to the gore department. Cronenberg uses graphic violence (and sex) in his films the way great chefs use a favored wok or knife—skillfully, as a precise tool to achieve exactly what he wants. His characteristically tight editing allows him to cut from the horrendous to the humorous or the beautiful with alacrity all the more exciting for its unhurried pace. He confronts you with the reality of violence just long enough for you to appreciate the severity, and then he releases you. Nobody on this side of the oceans handles violence in cinema better, and for all the digital tears wannabe-pundits have shed over this element, Eastern Promises shares a similar restraint with his prior film, A History of Violence, when compared to earlier efforts like Videodrome and Rabid. Predictably, the specter of A History of Violence hangs over any discussion of Eastern Promises. Fanboys, start your flamewars, because here it comes: Eastern Promises is a better film than A History of Violence. Certain elements that were a touch weak or loose in the latter film have had their nuts tightened. The ending is less predictable, as are certain twists along the way. Like all of Cronenberg’s films, however, even does even when these curves are spotted before we reach them they work to enhance other elements, for example stealth-mode gallows humor. Then there’s Viggo… The boy’s got chops. They may be chops of the brooding badass variety but chops nonetheless. While Viggo Mortensen has been likened to a what-if scenario wherein Dolph Lundgren sneaks onto the A-List, his wooden exterior is stripped to reveal a flexible and nuanced interior. Add to this the facts that his hair looks like the Gipper went to Count Dracula’s barber and that his accent is nigh-impeccable, and you got yourself the best performance of his career, easy. Mortensen purportedly spent weeks driving around Russia alone researching his part, but whatever this means, the level of realism brought to this role will forever distance him from the ranks of Kostner, Cruise and other golems of the cinema set. The rest of the cast is competent. Vincent Cassel slips up a few times, but just pretend his character had a French mother and we’re good. The others range from really damn intense to just okay, but Naomi Watts did her thing with aplomb, as did Sinead Cusack, and Armin Mueller-Stahl. Watts’ half of the storyline doubtlessly contributed to the sour-blanket gorehounds baying for blood but it gelled nicely by the end; it shows Cronenberg’s perhaps grown less bitter regarding motherhood since The Brood. Due in no small part to her nuanced performance, Watts’ character’s interactions with Viggo and the rest do not feel as strained as the premise would imply otherwise and demonstrate why she’s a far safer bet than old soapstone Kidman. The tone and plot lend this picture to being more of a companion piece to screenwriter Steven Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things than to A History of Violence. Knight favors a there-and-back-again structure which works well with such layered, multi-faceted stories as these, and that both revolve around immigrant populations in London inspires closer scrutiny to parallels between the two than I have space for here. The medical profession, death, crime and the vulnerability of immigrants are addressed here as much as his earlier effort. As to where Eastern Promises fits in Cronenberg’s larger body of work, it could be seen as a gender reversal of The Brood. Here fatherhood is the issue rather than motherhood, and we have the identical theme of a parent projecting his rage at and into his children and thus creating monsters. That Eastern Promises is nominally constrained to reality will allow the type of snobs who eschew the fantastic and the horrible to appreciate observations that were covered by the director 30 years ago, and predictably, they are not as shocking or powerful now as they were then.
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