Director David Cronenberg built a loyal fan base in the 1970s and 1980s with popular, off-beat cult films such as Scanners and Videodrome. Since then, he has gone mainstream - but has he lost the creative touches that originally endeared him to his fans? Cinema Retro's David Savage takes a look at Cronenberg's latest effort.
In Eastern Promises, David
Cronenberg's new crime thriller set in London's East End, Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo
Mortensen) stubs out a cigarette on his tongue just before "operating" on a
recent mob victim to prep him for disposal into the Thames – snipping off the
ends of his fingers with surgical clippers, bloodless and frozen solid after
spending a few days in a meat freezer. It seems to set the requisite
Cronenbergian tone: fixing a cold, unblinking gaze on bodily mutilation and
violence. There are a few more signature Cronenberg moments that punctuate
Eastern Promises, a thoughtfully paced, gloomy tale of honor and betrayal
in a Russian organized crime family, just enough to make the viewer aware that
this otherwise conventional tale is in the hands of Canada's most provocative
director. But the fun stops there. Working from another director's script (Steve
Knight, Academy Award-nomination for Dirty Pretty Things), Cronenberg is merely lending his own
signature treatment to a familiar-feeling genre piece with a Hollywood-style
happy ending, ill-suited to a story set in criminality, betrayal and violence.
I'll be the last person to force a director to be a one-trick pony, but this
film, while well done, engaging and credibly acted, could have been directed by
any of a dozen directors of Cronenberg's stature. It just doesn't seem worthy of
his perverse and brilliant talent.
Eastern Promises examines what happens when an interloper on a moral
crusade steps into a wholly amoral world with its own perverse codes of honor.
Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a midwife at a North London hospital, oversees the
birth of a baby whose mother, a 15-year old heroin addict and Russian immigrant,
dies in labor. The teenager has left a diary, and within its pages Anna
discovers the slavery and forced prostitution to which the young mother had been
subjected at the hands of one of London's most notorious organized crime
families, the Vory V Zakone, headed by Semyon (a dead-eyed and threatening Armin
Mueller-Stahl). His surface charm and grandfatherly warmth as the proprietor of
a private Russian dining club masks a brutal and vindictive core as the
patriarch of his crime family. His new driver, Nikolai (Mortensen) and violent
son (Vincent Cassel) will go to any lengths to protect the family's honor and
privacy. When the diary leads Anna to the restaurant to seek information as to
the girl's family and the baby's rightful inheritors, she unwittingly entangles
herself in a mortal struggle involving several lives, including her own.
Unlike Cronenberg's own films which he wrote
and directed (The Brood, Videodrome, Dead Ringers,
Crash , eXistenZ to name a few), Eastern Promises, like A History of Violence (2005) and Spider (2002) before it,
is disappointingly bereft of the familiar themes of transgression and "body
horror" on a visceral level his fans have come to expect. Mortensen may be the
director's new muse, as both seem on a mutually fruitful collaboration as they
explore psyche, physicality and identity here and in A History of
Violence. And as in many of Cronenberg's previous films, director of
photography Peter Suschitzky suffuses the film with a highly atmospheric,
elegant gloom, full of wine reds and deep shadows. But is it a worthwhile
Cronenberg outing if it doesn't provoke an argument over dinner, or no one flees
the theater in disgust? I dare say no.
With the exception of Naomi Watts, whose
character evokes the sort of role Jenny Agutter might have played thirty years
ago (and actually made me pine for), the cast is first rate. Mortensen creates a
thoroughly credible Russian thug, due to intensive research before filming,
involving traveling alone to Russia and immersing himself in locales frequented
by the thugs of Russia's crime families; Vincent Cassel, likewise, is wholly
believable as the volatile and conflicted son of Semyon. As Mortensen said in a
press interview and I agree with him, Cassel is able to begin the film as an
appalling thug and end the film by making the viewer care about his abused soul.
-David Savage