There are some great moments in David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises," but you have to wade through an awful lot of carnage to get to them.
The film offers a grim, grisly trip through the London underworld, in which there seem to be only two states of existence: violence, and the threat of violence. Characters bleed to death in lingering close-ups, their crimson wounds scouring the film's somber gray backdrop. It's unabashed theatre of the grotesque, made doubly disturbing by the fact that the narrative revolves around the innocence of a newborn infant.
It all starts when Anna (Naomi Watts) salvages the baby from her dying mother's womb. As a midwife, Anna takes it upon herself to seek out the dead girl's next of kin. This she does with the aid of the girl's diary, written in Russian but containing the card of a local restaurant. This eatery is run by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a grizzled Russian whose cold blue eyes narrow into slits at the mention of the mysterious girl.
When he's not busy preparing borscht, Semyon operates a lucrative criminal empire, assisted by his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and a Siberian thug named Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). Such were the disreputable scoundrels that sired the orphaned infant, and before long Anna gets mixed up in their machinations.
The plot of "Eastern Promises" hinges on a borderline absurdity; in real life, a nice London girl like Anna would take one look at Semyon's bloody gang and hop the first bus to Manchester. The screenplay paves over this improbability by means of a plot contrivance that I could have done without -- Anna, it seems, has recently miscarried, and takes up her investigation of the orphan's parentage as a misguided act of surrogate motherhood.
Such narrative distractions as this are easily forgiven, however, in the face of the film's overwhelming sense of atmosphere. Working with production designer Carol Spier, Cronenberg conjures up a vision of England's great metropolis so bleak and sunless that it borders on the post-apocalyptic. This ain't Mary Poppins' London, folks.
As a director, Cronenberg has always had an unhealthy taste for the sins of the flesh. His movies tend to be sweaty, sordid affairs, punctuated by abrupt spasms of violence and sex. His best films are those in which he applies this approach interrogatively; witness 2005's "A History of Violence," which cast Viggo Mortensen as a corn-fed country bumpkin with an inexplicable talent for killing people. Mortensen appears again in "Eastern Promises," and in both cases he flourishes under Cronenberg's direction. The actor stands as a figure of eerie grace amidst the charnel that surrounds him, his steely features offering a welcome counterpoint to the director's penchant for savagery.
"A History of Violence" was a bold and challenging film that delved unflinchingly into the human psychology of violence itself. "Eastern Promises" isn't nearly as resonant -- it's less a study in bloodshed than a lurid display of the same -- but the film still has enough ruthless energy to command the attention of an audience.
There are even some tantalizing strands of social commentary lurking beneath Cronenberg's Guignol. Steven Knight's screenplay envisions London's Russian mafia as a ragged tribe of expatriates, called to crime by their survival instinct. Anna and her family, meanwhile, are the very picture of bourgeois complacency. "We're not like them," Anna's mother solemnly intones, "We're normal people."
One gets the sense that "Eastern Promises" is intended for people like Anna's mother. The film finds sinister pleasure in thrusting two very disparate elements of London society -- the sheltered midwife and the den of thieves -- into each others' company, as if the coexistence of these entities were a stark and shocking revelation. It's not, but that doesn't mean the pairing isn't interesting to watch.
Much of the credit for this is due to Mortensen and Watts, who develop a captivating chemistry as the two leads. Watts has all the guileless vulnerability of a lamb in a lion's den; as the morally ambivalent mobster who helps her, Mortensen is enigma personified.
It grieves me to report that the ending of "Eastern Promises" is a bit of a letdown -- in its final moments, the film's Hitchcockian precision begins to unravel into a pile of unwelcome cliches; there's the unexpected revelation, the improbable change of heart, the meaningless gesture of romance ... you get the idea. It's as if Cronenberg, abashed by his own violent excesses, lacked the nerve to carry them to an appropriate conclusion and opted instead for sentimentality.
But no matter -- there's something hypnotically compelling about "Eastern Promises."
With its proclivity for garish violence, the film can hardly be accused of being easy to watch, yet I found myself unable to turn away. Even as the story crumbles in his hands, Cronenberg's meticulous attention to atmosphere sees the movie through.
"Eastern Promises" plunges the viewer deep into a world of dark and dirty beauty -- when the lights come up, you'll probably want a shower.
