← Back to Reviews
in
In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1966 film Torn Curtain, there is a prolonged, awkward murder scene, in which the victim struggles for a very long time before succumbing. “I thought it was time to show that it was very difficult, very painful, and it takes a long time to kill a man,” said Hitchcock. If you were to extrapolate that principle out onto an entire film, Eastern Promises is probably the type of film you would get.
The latest effort from acclaimed director David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises is a gritty story full of twists and turns. Its conclusion could be potentially described as both “happy” and “sad,” and it does not end so much as it stops.
The movie tells the story of a midwife named Anna (Naomi Watts) who helps an anonymous 14 year old girl give birth. The mother is tragically lost, but the baby survives, and the midwife takes it upon herself to find the girl’s family. All she has to guide her is the girl’s diary, which is in Russian, and needs to be translated. Her search leads her to Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Russian crime lord who begins to take an inordinate amount of interest in the diary’s contents.
The setup is jarring and compelling, but from this point the film devolves into a number of well-tread plot devices. It’s not Cronenberg’s fault that movies about organized crime have left precious few new concepts to explore, and he does bring a certain freshness to them, but many of the mob-related scenes still feel slightly stale. It’s hard to say if this could be remedied with less emphasis, or more. Regardless, the half-measure we get is sometimes unsatisfying.
The technical execution, however, is nearly flawless. Viggo Mortenson apparently traveled around Russia and Ukraine for weeks before filming, without the aid of a translator, in an effort to immerse himself in the culture and hone his accent. As a result, Mortenson completely inhabits his character Nikolai, a rising star in the Russian mob.
The film is predictably gory, but it’s not so much a violent film, as it is a brutal one. To be sure, we’ve seen more blood than this, but rarely has it felt so authentic. Violence is never undertaken for its own sake, however; it’s all in the name of survival.
Ultimately, the film is a mass of duality and contradiction. Cronenberg’s style is paradoxically rooted in understatement, and it’s hard to discern a particular message or moral. The story is, for the most part, split into two segments; Anna’s, and Nikolai’s. Though they cross paths often, one can’t help but feel that a better film could have been made by focusing more on either of them. Nikolai’s back story, in particular, piqued my curiosity.
Eastern Promises is worth seeing for its technical precision alone, but one can’t help but feel that there’s a much better, more focused film somewhere underneath it all.
The latest effort from acclaimed director David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises is a gritty story full of twists and turns. Its conclusion could be potentially described as both “happy” and “sad,” and it does not end so much as it stops.
The movie tells the story of a midwife named Anna (Naomi Watts) who helps an anonymous 14 year old girl give birth. The mother is tragically lost, but the baby survives, and the midwife takes it upon herself to find the girl’s family. All she has to guide her is the girl’s diary, which is in Russian, and needs to be translated. Her search leads her to Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Russian crime lord who begins to take an inordinate amount of interest in the diary’s contents.
The setup is jarring and compelling, but from this point the film devolves into a number of well-tread plot devices. It’s not Cronenberg’s fault that movies about organized crime have left precious few new concepts to explore, and he does bring a certain freshness to them, but many of the mob-related scenes still feel slightly stale. It’s hard to say if this could be remedied with less emphasis, or more. Regardless, the half-measure we get is sometimes unsatisfying.
The technical execution, however, is nearly flawless. Viggo Mortenson apparently traveled around Russia and Ukraine for weeks before filming, without the aid of a translator, in an effort to immerse himself in the culture and hone his accent. As a result, Mortenson completely inhabits his character Nikolai, a rising star in the Russian mob.
The film is predictably gory, but it’s not so much a violent film, as it is a brutal one. To be sure, we’ve seen more blood than this, but rarely has it felt so authentic. Violence is never undertaken for its own sake, however; it’s all in the name of survival.
Ultimately, the film is a mass of duality and contradiction. Cronenberg’s style is paradoxically rooted in understatement, and it’s hard to discern a particular message or moral. The story is, for the most part, split into two segments; Anna’s, and Nikolai’s. Though they cross paths often, one can’t help but feel that a better film could have been made by focusing more on either of them. Nikolai’s back story, in particular, piqued my curiosity.
Eastern Promises is worth seeing for its technical precision alone, but one can’t help but feel that there’s a much better, more focused film somewhere underneath it all.