In a barbershop in a gray London street, a Russian-accented businessman is getting his hair cut. Half a minute later, the businessman is dying from a slashed throat.
Meanwhile, a 15-year-old girl (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) comes into a pharmacy seeking help. Suddenly blood splashes on the floor underneath her feet. The dying girl is taken to hospital, leaving her baby girl and a mysterious diary in the hands of her midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts).
Cronenberg's Bid to Join Elite Coppola and De Palma
Thus begins Eastern Promises, Cronenberg's bid to join such elite mob movie-makers as Francis Ford Coppola (The Untouchables, The Godfather), Michael Mann (Heat) and Brian De Palma (Scarface). It's a stunning move for a director previously known for such twisted fare as Videodrome, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, and Cronenberg pulls it off. It's a minimalist examination of the savagery that exists just under the veneer of civilized life, where bizarre, symbolic tattoos under designer clothing tell a man's brutal life story.
Anna's search to find the baby's family leads her to a posh restaurant where a generous old man named Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) first offers her some freshly-cooked borscht, then to translate the diary for her. In the same breath, he asks her where she lives.
Anna's eyes flicker as she realizes what the audience already knows: Semyon isn't as kindly as he'd like us to believe. He's the boss of the Vory V Zakone family of Russian mafia, and both baby and diary are a loose end that he wants to get rid of.
Not only that, Anna finds herself continually speaking with the family driver, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). He exudes all the elegant lethality of a cobra, but something draws her to him, just like he's drawn to her. It's a masterpiece of unwilling attraction: two people who know they must stay away from each other's world, but can't help getting involved. And both of them soon discover that nothing is quite what it seems, and betrayal lurks around every corner.
Mortensen: Old School Cool
If Cronenberg secretly wants to be Coppola or De Palma, then Mortensen is his Robert De Niro. Lord of the Rings fans will barely recognize him as Nikolai, who exudes menace simply by doing nothing at all. Everything, from his Russian accent to the way he flicks his cigarette prior to cutting off a dead man's fingers, is note-perfect for the character he is portraying. This is not Jack Nicholson, bringing his persona to every role he takes on; this is De Niro in his prime, submerging himself to play every role like a completely different character.
Whether it's a flicker of his eyes betraying an emotion he would rather not experience, or fighting for his life in a bathhouse brawl that sets new standards for fight-scene brutality, Mortensen takes center stage of this movie and refuses to let go.
The other performances are strong, too. Watts holds her own as the moral center of the film, the midwife who simply wants what's best for the baby girl who's been thrust into her life. And Vincent Cassel turns in a nuanced performance as Kirill, an outwardly vile gangster who is slowly realizing that he's not the man his father wants him to be. Cassel often plays ice-cold villains, and he takes full advantage of the chance to play a character who is not as one-note as we might suspect.
But Eastern Promises is Mortensen's movie. When he tells Anna, at a crucial moment, " I can't become king if someone else already sits on the throne," it is a moment fraught with meaning, and he delivers it perfectly.
Eastern Promises: A Mob Classic?
While Eastern Promises doesn't quite hold the epic sweep of The Godfather series or the scabrous character study of Scarface, it takes the viewer on a disturbing journey through the heart of darkness that is the criminal underworld, and shows us what happens when passions, family bonds and emotions mix in a furnace that burns everyone, no matter how armoured they feel themselves to be.
But the true heart of this movie belongs to Mortensen's performance as Nikolai. Mortensen's role as Lucifer in The Prophecy demonstrated that he was an actor worth watching. As Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, he found a star-making role. With Eastern Promises, Viggo Mortensen has found a part that should have every A-List director in Hollywood clamouring to work with him. It's that good.
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