Eastern Promises

GREEN's SYMBOLICALLY TATTOOED BODY REVIEW:

Anna (Naomi Watts) is a midwife in a London hospital who helps deliver the baby of a teenage girl who dies during childbirth. Searching for the girl's identity, Anna finds her diary, written in Russian, in the dead girl's purse. When the diary is translated, Anna is inadvertently thrust into the world of the Russian Mob, headed by Godfather-like Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and his driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). Anna is trying to discover the child's family and in the process discovers an unexpected ally.

This is an intriguing tale of deceit, loyalty, trust and family in London's most notorious Russian Crime family which is part of the Vory V Zakone criminal brotherhood.

The film is brilliantly directed by David Cronenberg who has a great cast to work with. I loved Armin Mueller-Stahl's Vito Corleone-like performance in this film. Charming and hospitable to a fault on the one side, but definitely a guy you don't want to cross on the other. Mortensen and Cassel are excellent and Watts holds her own with the boys in this film. Cassel is an underrated and under appreciated actor by American audiences, I think. The supporting cast is also good.

For the most part, Steven Knight has written an excellent script. The only weak part, in my opinion, is the ending which is nice and happy and fluffy but kind of abrupt. One minute the baby is saved from death, then some undisclosed length of time passes and the baby has not only grown (as babies tend to do) but has apparently been adopted, then the credits roll. I'm not sure how I would have done the ending myself, but something is missing from the ending we are given.

The special features on the DVD, two short featurettes on the making of the film and the symbolism of Russian tattoos are short but informative.

**** out of *****

SCRIBE'S I CAN'T BELIEVE GREEN GAVE AWAY THE ENDING BUT HE MUST'VE BEEN SLEEPING DURING THE FINAL SHOT OF THE FILM REVIEW:

After having suffered through the bafflingly critically acclaimed A History of Violence, I wasn’t too hot for a second David Cronenberg/Viggo Mortensen collaboration. The first one was simply awful, a dull, uninspired “mystery-thriller” with no thrills and a transparent mystery featuring wooden performances by everyone except the ever-dependable Ed Harris.

Eastern Promises, like a new, gifted lover, gets the taste of the bad movie out of my mouth and replaces it with the minty freshness of quality. Can you tell I’m trying to audition for VH-1?

This time around, instead of small town America, the setting is London, England. The principal characters are Russian, however. Mobsters, to be exact. Mortensen plays the Russian boss’s driver, whose child-like and amoral son goes through periods of extreme adoration and hostility, sometimes within seconds.

The plot concerns a young Ukrainian girl who wanders into a druggist’s shop begging for help. The druggist tells her to wait her turn and she collapses on the floor in a pool of her own blood. Although she’s rushed to the hospital, she dies during childbirth. The girl was 14 years old. Enter the comely Naomi Watts as a half-Russian, half-English mid-wife working in the same hospital. She takes the baby home with her, which, apparently, is normal practice over there, and brings the girl’s diary along as well.

Watts’ character can’t read Russian and she might ask her father if he weren’t such a d_k. At one point, he tells her she lost her baby because it was half black, implying God or Fate wouldn’t allow such an abomination to be born. So she seeks her translation elsewhere. Unfortunately, the kindly restaurateur who volunteers to help is also a major Russian crime boss.

His over-eagerness to translate the diary and have it in his possession should be a warning sign to almost anybody, but she’s pretty naïve and sheltered. Soon she finds herself involved in a minor conspiracy as the contents of the diary are slowly translated.

The performances are subtle, and rightfully so. An American version of this film would have been filled with bombastic incidental music and lots of shocked facial expressions. Cronenberg is a Canadian shooting in England with non-American actors. There’s none of that overblown melodrama like what we saw in “The Departed” as everybody tried to mug for screen time. The violence is also kept to a minimum, adding to its overall impact, and features one of the most realistic fight scenes ever filmed.

This film has an otherworldly feel to it, a fact that could only work in its favor. Despite its slow pace, it never drags and the feeling of peeking inside someone’s window carries the storyline to its conclusion. To discuss more would be to ruin the story, so just rent or borrow the damn thing!

**** out of *****