Cronenberg’s Cagey World of Crime
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Pre-formed expectations unfairly dog the work of the inimitable Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Incredibly, fans often still expect repeat performances from the transmogrifying fleshmaster behind “Videodrome” and “The Fly.” Ironically, his last film, the critically acclaimed thriller “A History of Violence,” may have set the director up for a new fall by virtue of its rare mastery of slick, satisfying entertainment and multifaceted commentary.
Like that film, “Eastern Promises” stars a totally committed Viggo Mortensen and features menacing thugs and secrets that imperil curious characters. But this more hermetic film, set in a London inhabited by Russian gangsters and an intrepid Naomi Watts living with her family, is a kind of ethnic social study. Rooted in the psychological mystery of Mr. Mortensen’s character and a saturnine Old World mystique, it doesn’t aim to reach out and grab you, but to absorb you.
“Eastern Promises” does open with a physiologically immediate overture that is typical of Mr. Cronenberg: a gangland throat-slitting viewed close-up, a teenage girl’s fatal hemorrhage, and the birth of her translucent-skinned preemie. This mysterious newborn is what dangerously links Anna (Ms. Watts), the nurse who cares for the orphaned infant, to a world bound by the codes of the vory v zakone, the Russian criminal brotherhood.
We soon meet quietly brutal, blue-eyed patriarch Semyon (Armand Mueller-Stahl), his flighty son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and their rising underling Nikolai (Mr. Mortensen), a chauffeur with many duties besides driving. Semyon, who runs a grand old-fashioned restaurant covered in red velvet, seems unnervingly focused on the scrawled journal that the dead mother left behind. Anna, eager to learn more about the baby, finds out from her Russian uncle (the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski) that the diary chronicles a wretched life of drugged prostitution.
The shadowy existence of Semyon’s underworld business is typified by their family brothel, which is concealed within a genteel-looking row house, or when Nikolai matter-of-factly carves up a corpse in an anonymous hideout just upstairs from a normal London street. “Eastern Promises,” written by the screenwriter Steve Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things”), draws us into this world, leaving Anna to protest from the sidelines, struggling to hold someone accountable.
Nikolai, ever waiting outside by his car, takes a humane, good-humored interest in Anna but keeps a foreboding distance. Mr. Mortensen, seen covered in prison tattoos in a gangster induction ceremony, sports wraparound shades, hair slicked back to a peak, and sucked-in cheeks that recall the hard-boned face of his character in “History,” post-regression. His Nikolai is an enigmatic, slowly assured avenging presence, an obscure protector to Anna and, in a different way, to Kirill, who disappoints his father with his rashness.
“Eastern Promises” feels distinctly like a minor work, and sometimes even unbalanced. It underserves Ms. Watts with a vanishing role and clumsily integrates a voice-over drawn from the dead teenager’s diary. The monstrous central metaphor that customarily grows to consume Mr. Cronenberg’s films exists only liminally here, in the form of Nikolai’s tattoos and their play on surfaces, permanence, and identity.
But Mr. Cronenberg’s usual fusion of elements (including longtime cinematographer Peter Suschitzky’s warm visuals and nuanced pacing within scenes) creates a heightened intensity that rewards, and perhaps demands, attention. A disconcertingly voluptuous shot of a softly singing prostitute seems to transport her back to her village in Russia, while a scene of a post-game soccer mob streaming into the streets poses a mainstream foil to the tribal world of the gangsters.
Mr. Cronenberg never fails to include at least one spectacular sequence, and “Eastern Promises” does not disappoint, with a nightmarish murder attempt on Nikolai whilst naked and vulnerable in a bathhouse. His lurching, grappling melee with two assailants wielding carpet-cutters elicits a bodily dread as potent as any horror invention. Mr. Cronenberg continues his project of making us feel how much this sort of bodily transformation — namely violent attack — hurts.
“Eastern Promises” suffers from Mr. Knight’s thematic conveniences, like making Anna the recent victim of a failed pregnancy, but, again, more striking to most viewers will be the difference in plotting prowess and conceptual scope from the resonant parable of “A History of Violence.” Perhaps, like Semyon’s world, “Eastern Promises” must remain a secretive, foreign place to the approaching outsider, who enters at his or her own risk.