Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Eastern Promises

Directed by David Cronenberg
Written by Steve Knight

As I watched Eastern Promises, I first heard the authorage of Steve Knight (formerly credited as Steven Knight).  My experience with his voice as a screenwriter comes from Dirty Pretty Things, an excellent and underrated film from 2002.  And like Eastern Promises, it takes a very small slice of British life involving mostly an immigrant culture, beautifully drawn and generally uninterested in assimilation.

The huge difference between the two films, aside from the details, came from the directors.  And you couldn’t find two directors less similar than David Cronenberg and Stephen Frears.  Cronenberg, as a stylist, is an ice man while Frears is, brings a warmth to any genre in which he works. 

Cronenberg is one of cinema’s finest objectifying fetishists, as opposed to David Lynch, a modern master of subjective fetishism.  This is why a movie like A History of Violence is absolutely brilliant and simply doesn’t work for some people.  They can’t get away from the cool kink that he brings to the party.  And if anyone who wasn’t as cool took the script to that film and tried playing it as warmly real, it would be horrible.  But from the extreme nature of the stairway sex to the graphic nature of the killings and even the stylization of the emotional twists, it is all of a part, under control, and calculated to crawl under your skin.  (This is why it is such a shame that Cronenberg didn’t decide to do Basic Instinct 2, leaving it to a terrific warmth director, Michael Caton-Jones, who couldn’t melt Ms Cold Stone.  Cronenberg could have matched Verhoeven’s smirk with his painful cool, a potentially fascinating successor.)

In Eastern Promises, Cronenberg takes on Knight’s fairly-traditional-on-the-surface story of the Mafioso with a heart of gold, the Mafia family he works for and is working his way up through, and the blonde innocent who forces him to make decisions about doing the right thing.  It gets more complicated than that, but that description will get you through the first half of the film.  What makes it more than expected, initially, is Knight, who is so interested in the details of the lives into which he is looking.  Story twists are all supported because, it seems, Knight twists only to push the characters into more complexity, not the other way around. 

Cronenberg takes the story and up the ante.  When a medical situation goes wrong, expect a dark, slippery pool of blood.  Throats are cut with an enthusiasm most reminiscent of Sylvia Sidney’s purgatory dead clerk in Beetlejuice.  For me, the most shocking moment of the film was Viggo Mortensen’s nude knife fight… because his nudity was such a minor issue and made such a big deal about.  Viggo’s penis is present, but barely seen unless you are obsessed with watching Viggo’s penis.  (You know who you are!)  But that sequence is far more graphic in the blood portion than it is the nudity.  Leave it to Cronenberg to make sure that all of the violence in this film personal -  performed with knifes, not guns - never pointing this detail out to the audience, signaling us to be aware.

I haven’t mentioned Naomi Watts yet because, as it turns out, her character is the soft spot of the film.  Unlike the male and female lead characters of Dirty Pretty Things, here Knight has a lead character who is neither a victim nor a leader.  Nor is she, as the outsider Brit, really brought into the Russian circle that she finds herself stuck in by her curiosity.  Her character does drive the action and the evolution of Mortensen’s character, but it often feels like she holds the least interest for our director.  The only thing that makes sense to me about Knight’s choices with the character is that her impotence may well be a comment on the British who think they can control the Russian culture in their own streets… but truly cannot… only able to hope to be allowed a happy ending.

The real meat of the film is the Russian mob, led by Armin Mueller-Stahl, his bungling son played by Vincent Cassel, and Viggo Mortensen as the ambitious driver.  Also on the Russian tip is director Jerzy Skolimowski, working as an actor for Cronenberg here, as he has in the past for Julian Schnabel, Tim Burton, Taylor Hackford, and a few others.  He plays Watts’ character’s Russian uncle.  Theirs is the universe we are being welcomed into in Eastern Promises.  The film is filled with details of why “they” are the same as us… and how they are so different.

Cronenberg is a double edged sword here.  He brings something to the film that few other directors would have and he is a consummate pro behind that camera.  But unlike someone like Frears, whose images make you feel like you could sit down on the couch you are watching the characters walk by, Cronenberg’s style is always apparent.  His characters live in a kind of hyper reality.  And what makes Knight such an interesting writer is that he is a sociologist of intimate behavior. 

Eastern Promises is a good movie, no doubt.  And the Cronenberg touches are fun… for those of us who enjoy a gaping, gurgling neck wound now and again.  But the script might have made a better movie in the hands of a director with less of a vision and more interest in serving the screenplay’s ambitions first. 

-David Poland