Return of the Cronenberg

David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises opens with two blood-lettings: the first initiated by an innocent coerced into an act of evil, the second inflicted upon an innocent by evil men. Rarely has a film portrayed the shedding of blood as such a desperate drain of life-force: from the sickly hemorrhaging of an impregnated young prostitute, to the frantic geyser from a razor-ed jugular. A momentous, blood-drenched fight in a Russian steam bath dizzyingly articulates the vulnerability, resilience, and threatening/threatened eroticism of the male body. Cronenberg’s specific brand of “body consciousness” from Shivers (1975) to Videodrome (1983) to A History of Violence (2005) has been a primal theme throughout his career: a consistent focus on the human animal and its many societal cages. Eastern Promises is a brilliantly executed genre film, which is nothing if not another elaborate cage. Viggo Mortensen is in full bad-ass mode as Nikolai, the humble driver for a Russian crime family in London who has served the Boss’s loose cannon of a son (a frenzied Vincent Cassel) far too long. Naomi Watts plays a local midwife who gets entangled when the aforementioned prostitute dies in childbirth, and fails to grasp that the girl’s diary contains the sort of information that makes one’s brain more likely to end up on the outside rather than the inside of one’s head. Rather than eschew genre conventions to hand in the sort of metaphysical piece that many like-minded directors might deliver, Cronenberg is content to wonder at the motivations usually taken for granted in a mob film. How, why, and when people act altruistically/selfishly is what fascinates him, and like any good artist he has a shrewd hand in audience expectations for his character’s motivations. What first presents itself as a glimmer of goodness in an evil man might actually be the dying sparks of conscience in a good man. These moral distinctions are entirely constructions of the genre: Cronenberg, in usual form, is investigating which exactly can be more accurately termed “humane.”

EASTERN PROMISES DIR. DAVID CRONENBERG | RATED R | OPENS FRIDAY AT THEATERS EVERYWHERE

Tags: crime, cronenberg, eastern promises, russian mob