David Cronenberg's Latest Film: Eastern Promises Review

David Cronenberg, the Canadian director well-known for his bizarre movies "Videodrome" and "Naked Lunch" among others, is now more focused on the dramatic angle in his movies more than the bizarre ones that earned his reputation. He continues this with his latest film "Eastern Promises," a character based drama set in the dangers of the Russian mafia. While the dramatic parts of the film work nicely, the problems lie more in the crime aspect whenever it is brought up.

Naomi Watts plays Anna, a midwife who delivers the baby of a 14 year old girl who dies from hemorrhaging during the birth. Anna looks through the girl's bag to find out the girl's identity, but instead comes across her diary. It's written in Russian, but luckily Anna has a Russian background and can get her uncle to translate. Inside the diary is a business card for a restaurant, and Anna decides to meet the manager in case he has any information about the girl. What she doesn't know is that by going she is putting the lives of herself, her family and the baby at risk.

Once she does go to the restaurant, we begin to follow the lives of the people who work there. Semyon is the owner and head of the Vory V Zakone family in the Russian mafia. His son Kirill (played by Vincent Cassel) and driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) work together with a brotherly love type of friendship. Semyon clearly favours Nikolai over his own son, and there are signs of bitterness from Kirill at times (mostly when he is drunk). A good example is when Kirill forces Nikolai to have sex with a prostitute while he watches as some sort of test for loyalty. Once Anna interferes with the lives of the family, Nikolai seems to take a liking to her and tries to warn Anna of the dangers she'll face.

Cronenberg usually tends to pull out great performances from his actors, and here it's no different. Naomi Watts and Vincent Cassel play their parts well, while Viggo Mortensen and Armin Muehller-Stahl will most likely be getting some awards buzz come early next year. Mortensen delves right into his character, while Stahl plays his role from nice family man to one so ruthlessly that you can see why almost everyone fears his appearance despite his age. The characters are all written wonderfully by Steven Knight. Even with a limited background to some of the characters, they're developed well enough to make them all well-rounded. Not much information is given on Kirill's relationship with his father, but what we do see explains a lot towards the actions he makes in the movie.

The violence in "Promises" is similar to "A History of Violence" in that it's very graphic but shown periodically. Since everything is pointed towards the characters more than the story, when the blood pours it creates a bigger impact. The bath house fight scene is one that will be remembered for a while, and certainly one of the best scenes in a movie this year.

Even though the movie is primarily focused on the people rather than the 'business,' the times when the story progresses are where the major faults come out in "Eastern Promises." At times it feels rushed, and since we've spent so much time slowly stretching out the character traits the shifts in pace are easily noticeable. A piece of information is revealed towards the end of the film that doesn't make too much of a difference when it really should have. The closing loses a lot of impact because of what we know. The ending itself is where the main problem of the movie comes in. It seems like they had to throw things in overdrive, since the 'climax' of the movie only lasts around five minutes. It just went by too fast, and came off like they had to go re-do the ending from studio or test screening response even though that's not the case. This is one of the times where I think the movie should in fact be longer so that the ending wouldn't fly by us so fast.

Still, "Eastern Promises" is a good movie and will definitely receive some buzz come Oscar time for the acting categories. David Cronenberg seems to have found a new home with this and "History of Violence," and I wouldn't complain if he stuck to making these kinds of movies from now on. There was a potential here to be something really great, but a few snags in the storytelling made a lot of it fall apart. Since the majority of the movie was so well done, the flaws make a bigger impact unfortunately. Luckily it didn't take away from the characters themselves, who are all developed and involving in their own way. That alone is worth the price to see it.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give it a 7.