Eastern Promises

Upon reading Roger Ebert’s review of the film “Eastern Promises,” I look forward eagerly to when I will be able to see it. Unfortunately, it is not currently playing in the general vicinity. Judging by Ebert’s review, the movie is a fabulous and engrossing work.

David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” opens with a throat-slashing and a young
woman collapsing in blood in a drugstore, and connects these events with a
descent into an underground of Russians who have emigrated to London and brought
their crime family with them. Like the Corleone family, but with a less wise and
more fearsome patriarch, the Vory V Zakone family of the Russian mafia operates
in the shadows of legitimate business – in this case, a popular restaurant.

After that hint toward what the movie holds in store, the temptation to just brush it off as another typical mafia movie disappears entirely.

Ebert showers praises upon the writer, Steven Knight, who also wrote the script for “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002). He says He’s fascinated by the worlds within the London world. Here, too. His lines of morality are more murkily drawn here, as allegiances and loyalties shift, and old emotions turn out to be forgotten but not dead. This absolutely draws me toward the movie and makes me want to see it even more. It is a wonderful thing to experience a story. What is an even more wonderful thing is to experience the underside of that story. Instead of seeing what everybody else sees, we get a little bit of a treat in viewing part of a hidden world.

The cast (including Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, and Armin Muller-Stahl) is another point of praise for Ebert. Although not all of the casting seems perfectly logical at first glance, they mesh together beautifully, each actor delving into their character’s life. “Mortensen is not Russian, but don’t even think about the problem of an accent; he digs so deeply into the role you may not recognize him at first.” Clearly, this performance by Viggo Mortensen is significantly more involved than in your average film.

Mortensen’s Nikolai is the key player, trusted by Semyon. We are reminded of Don
Corleon’s trust in an outsider, Tom Hagen, over his own sons, Sonny and Fredo.
Here Semyon depends on Nikolai more than Kirill, who has an ugly streak that
sometimes interferes with the orderly conduct of business. Anna (Watts) senses
she can trust Nikolai, too, even though it is established early that this
tattooed warrior is capable of astonishing violence. At a time when movie “fight
scenes” are as routine as the dances in musicals, Nikolai engages in a fight in
this film that sets the same kind of standard that “The French Connection” set
for chases. Years from now, it will be referred to as a benchmark.

From this, it is obvious that Mortensen’s character is absolutely fascinating. To be so trusted by the mafia, befriend an outsider (Watts), and live to tell the tale, is quite a feat. It is also very enticing to hear of the terrible yet amazing fight scene. To witness a “benchmark” fight is a rarity in today’s theater.

Ebert’s lack of discussion about the plot is at first puzzling, but he justifies it. “What the director and writer do here is not unfold a plot, but flay the skin from a hidden world…[giving away the plot] would be fatal, because this is not a movie of what or how, but of why. And for a long time you don’t see the why coming.” This absence of knowledge only makes the film more intriguing. Even before seeing the movie, an air of suspense is instilled. This is more than enough to make a person absolutely yearn to view a film. In Ebert’s final sentence of the review, he gives his last solid reason for such lush praise of a movie. “The actors and the characters merge and form a reality above and apart from the story, and the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature.”