Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Promises,
Promises
(Eastern Promises, 10/8/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
I'll
start this demurral from David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
with a confession: I was not all that taken with his last effort, A
History of Violence, either. Once upon a time, Cronenberg made his
name with mordant, sophisticated, utterly satisfying horrors like Scanners
(1981), Videodrome (1983), Dead Ringers (1988), and a surprisingly
effective remake of The Fly (1986)—movies that reimagined
the tricks and tropes of visceral horror to say interesting things about
our precious, precarious mortality.
Lately, he's gone suspiciously "mature"
on us, turning out conventional thrillers that seem to crave mainstream
respectability. Spider (2002), Violence (2005), and now
Promises are, without a doubt, well-wrought, even admirable works
compared to most of the Hollywood competition. What they lack are ambition
and excitement. Full disclosure: I'd trade the thin rewards of ten Histories
of Violence for ten minutes of the kind of penetrating horror that
was the trademark of early Cronenberg.
Promises is set in London—which
is strangely empty-seeming here—inside an émigré
Russian community now more famous for its organized crime than its beet
soup. Anna (Naomi Watts) is a pediatric nurse one generation removed
from the old country. When a pregnant Russian teenager (Sarah-Jeanne
Labrosse)dies at the hospital after being severely beaten, Anna takes
more than a professional interest in the fate of her premature infant.
Her inquiries into the mother's life of prostitution leads her to a
swank restaurant run by the grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl).
Of course, there's something not quite right about the old man. The
clan's hatchet-faced driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), meanwhile, is
so obviously creepy he must be something other than he seems. As Anna
closes in on the truth about the dead girl, he gets unexpected help
from Nikolai, who seems to have an agenda of his own.
More should not be said for risk
of being accused of spoiling the end, but really, is there anything
that isn't completely predictable about the "hood with a heart
of gold"? With its deliberate pace, unsurprising menu, and air
of cool competence, Promises is like visiting an eastern European
restaurant with a solid reputation, but slightly past its prime. The
only truly eye-opening scene is set in a Russian bathhouse, where a
buck-nikkid Nikolai brawls with a pair of blade-wielding Chechen assassins.
Give Viggo (who is pushing fifty) credit for a healthy body image—he
appears to do the entire fight without resorting to a double. Of his
particular assets, there is no longer any dispute. The only question
left is why Chechen assassins don't carry guns.
Unfortunately, Naomi Watts offers
nothing like Mortensen's fearlessness. In fact, this is perhaps the
most underwhelming performance this talented actress has ever delivered;
one imagines any number of other sweet-faced blondes (Diane Kruger,
perhaps?) could have brought equal somnolence to the role. Too bad they
don't hand out tattoos at pediatric nursing school the way they do in
the Russian mob.
While contemplating an après-film
snack of pirogies and sour-cream, it occurred to this writer how few
of the leads in Promises are authentically Russian. Watts is
British/Australian, Mortensen is Danish/American, Vincent Cassell (who
plays Semyon's feckless son) is French, and Jerzy Skolimowski (Anna's
father) is a well-known Polish writer-director (Moonlighting).
Only Mueller-Stahl, who has spent most of his career playing Germans,
might be mistaken for a Russian (his home town in eastern Germany was
annexed by the Soviet Union when he was a boy). Perhaps this is just
as well—for all it will do for careers of Mortensen and Cronenberg,
Promises will do little to further the cause of Russian tourism.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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