Interesting, enjoyable, with some wonderful moments, but something of a letdown after ‘History of Violence.’ Whereas HoV is full of quiet menace, here the menace is right in your face, on the surface of the film. Cronenberg revels in the blood, from an opening assassination, through a bloody birth, to a remarkable scene in a public steambath which features a naked, tattooed Viggo Mortensen sliding in pools of blood. Whereas the transformation of the Mortensen character in HoV takes us by surprise, here he glowers and exudes power from the first moment we see him.
Some nice performances, especially Armin Mueller-Stahl, Naomi Watts, and Mortensen, when he lets his face crease and his hair flop a little. But I couldn’t help feeling that Cronenberg bought into the allure of the Russian mob a little too much. Oddly enough, this made me think fondly of a much earlier Mortensen film, ‘American Yakuza’: a true B-movie, but one that played with betrayal and honors in a mafia setting in ways that I found more satisfying than ‘Eastern Promises.’ [SPOILER]
The scene in which Mortensen is initiated into the mob was played too straight (and suffered in comparison with the way in which Christopher’s becoming a made man was played in ‘The Sopranos’). Of course, the baby had to be saved at the last moment. And there is a final shot of Mortensen, now the boss, which could have been much more powerful, but which ultimately jars because, even at that point, we don’t feel we know his character well enough to understand the ambivalence of his feelings.
Really, this is well worth watching, and I have concentrated on my objections rather than the joys of the film. It just trawls in the same channels as ‘History of Violence’, and it is not as good as that film.
you people really need to learn how to hide spoilers better (for example, by putting the spoiler warning on the main page and the actual spoiler after the “more” tag). now i’m going to have to wait till alcohol has killed my current crop of memory cells before i watch the movie.
Too little, too late: I’ve changed the post. But I’ll know for the future.
I enjoyed this. I loved the way rich reds and blues emerge as tonal rhymes throughout the picture (and in particular one shade of a cerulean blue which recurs in tattoos, a tent covering a corpse on a beach, scarves on the necks of a football mob leaving a stadium); I loved the Tippi Hedren shot of Naomi Watts on her archaic motorbike in her archaic glasses and helmet, clearly “driving” on stage in front of a screen; every single thing Viggo Mortensen says and does. Is it slight? Well, hmm. Maybe. It’s clearly not thrumming with the explicit backbeats of some of Cronenberg’s more disturbing stuff, yet I found it so precise and smart in its limning of character and its depiction of a social milieu, let alone its clean clear genre play…
Between this and Yuma, I feel like the well-tempered genre film is getting more of its due, after a summer all too empty of any such pleasures.
I didn’t say ‘Eastern Promises’ was slight, and I didn’t intend to imply that it was. What I said was that any film by David Cronenberg that foregrounds Russian mob violence inevitably invites comparison with ‘History of Violence,’ and that is a much better film.
There are undeniable moments of enjoyment: the film came alive for me in every scene inside the restaurant; and I got enormous personal pleasure from the scene in which an Arsenal fan has his throat slit as he pisses on a headstone in a cemetery with Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium looming in the background. Who among us has not wanted to act out that scene?
The writer is Steven Knight, and too much of this film is like his last film, ‘Dirty Pretty Things’: a voyage of discovery into the dark underbelly of London’s immigrant communities. I guess violence coming to the bucolic Midwest is more interesting to me than discovering that prostitution, drug use and murder lurk beneath the rain swept streets of London.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of History and, therefore, was quite surprised by Eastern Promises while watching it with Mike last week. The filmmakers’ craft, the art direction, the acting (in particular Mortensen), the story; all kept me compelled. When the credits started rolling, I was disappointed; I wanted even more. The next day, however, I must admit EP felt a bit thin. I knew this wasn’t film I cared to see again (as Mike metions, everything is precise and smart and cleanly etched, but the film doesn’t dig too deeply beneath the surface of things). Dirty Pretty Things (even Cronenberg’s Spider) stuck with me much longer. It was much harder to push the images and emotional responses those films generated out of my head.
I enjoyed this a lot, but it was rather straight-forward, wasn’t it? Russians as a people frighten me, even more so when they’re not in Russia. So I didn’t notice until a few days later how unsurprising every aspect of the film was. Just the idea of a Rusiian mob in London kept me off-balance throughout the film.
Even Howard Shore’s score was strangely subdued. His soundtracks are almost always top-notch, and I always look forward to his collaborations with Cronenberg.
That fight scene in the baths was at least squirm-inducing, and I’m always glad to have a good Cronenberg squirm in my seat.
I”m surprised this didn’t do better business after History of Violence did well, and re-teaming Viggo and DC. And Viggo-nudity on top of that. One review I read said that in Viggo DC has found his muse. I’m not sure about that – 15 movies and 30 years into his career – but they are a couple of strong performances, better perhaps than the actual movies.
I disliked Naomi Watts’ character and her motivations. It’s one thing to bend the law a bit to try to put a child with its family and avoid entering a nightmarish ward-of-the-state world. But quite another to pull all of the lame, dangerous moves she makes, especially after it becomes clear to her who she is dealing with. I was also sorry we didn’t get to see more of the slow son and the conflicted sexuality of Kirill.
Oh yeah – and since Jeff mentions Spider, I bought a DVD of this a few months ago at a thrift store, and it held up very well for me. It’s a remarkable movie with a lot of great performances. Good stuff indeed.