Eastern Promises
By David Sterritt
Director: David Cronenberg. Screenplay: Steve Knight. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky, Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Production design: Carol Spier. Music: Howard Shore. Producers: Robert Lantos, Paul Webster. With: Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Sinéad Cusack, Jerzy Skolimowski, Josef Altin, Mina E. Mina, Aleksandar Mikic, Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse, Raza Jaffrey, Shannon-Fleur Roux, Donald Sumpter, Tereza Srbova, Michael Sarne. UK/Canada. Languages: English/Russian. 99 min. 2007.
After a pregnant foreign-born prostitute falls into a fatal coma while pleading for help in a London pharmacy, a midwife (Naomi Watts) manages to deliver her baby and to retrieve a diary from the dead woman’s clothing, which she searches for clues to her identity so she can send the newborn to her family. Since the diary is written in Russian, she asks a Russian restaurant owner (Armin Mueller-Stahl) to translate it, unaware that he is a member of the infamous Vory V Zakone crime organization, in which his psychopathic son (Cassel) and menacing chauffeur (Mortensen) are also deeply involved. The diary, needless to say, contains information of great interest to the mobsters, and of great potential harm to the woman who found it.
The movie’s tagline, “Every sin leaves a mark,” makes it sound like a probing exploration of good and evil and violence and redemption, and since David Cronenberg is an imaginative visual stylist, he makes effective use of cringe-inducing mayhem and suggestive details, such as the symbolic tattoos etched into the driver’s body as manifest signs of his hard-bitten history and rising position in the criminal syndicate. But intriguing material like this notwithstanding, the film never gets within hailing distance of originality, much less profundity, and critics who praise its novel treatments of bodily inscription and sins of the family are writing about the picture they wish Cronenberg had made, not the one they actually saw. Change the accents and surnames and this would be a standard-issue Mafia yarn, craftily acted but overfamiliar all the same, with a late-story twist that’s as trite as it is tepid in its apparently philosophical intentions.
For a reminder of the heights Cronenberg can reach when he’s most inspired—and Mortensen too, for that matter--take another look at the engrossing 2005 drama A History of Violence,”which is more intelligent and provocative than this from first frame to last. It’s no pleasure to say it, but I can’t think of a weaker Cronenberg film. I suspect his more thoughtful admirers will give it a respectful look and let it pass quietly by, hoping with good reason that he’ll return to top form next time around.
