Steven Knight, the screenwriter behind Dirty Pretty Things and Amazing Grace seems to have learned a most valuable lesson. A social conscience is all well and good but if one doesn’t wish to preach to the converted then sugar coating your depiction of human trafficking is surely the way to go. His script for Eastern Promises, a thrilling post-Sopranos crime flick, is just the ticket. Of course it helps that David Cronenberg, the most consistently fascinating filmmaker on the planet, directs the film. The result may be the classiest B-movie ever made.
Like its superb predecessor, A History Of Violence, Eastern Promises stars a brooding Viggo Mortensen as an ambiguously scrupled action hero. His world, painted by Mr. Cronenberg in garish, exotic strokes, is a London demimonde of expatriate Russian mobsters and pimps. Playing Alice In Gangsterland, this tantalisingly dark locale is gate crashed by Naomi Watts, a decent minded midwife seeking to trace the relatives a teenage prostitute who has recently died in childbirth. Guilelessly, her first port of call is the Trans-Siberian restaurant where owner Armin Mueller-Stahl lavishes the young nurse (herself of Russian origin) with parental concern. But all is not as it seems. The eatery is a front for the Vory V Zakone criminal underworld and Herr Mueller-Stahl, it soon transpires, is even more chilling than his buffoonishly vicious son (Vincent Cassel). When they learn that Ms. Watts possesses the late teenager’s incriminating diary, she finds herself in considerable peril. Will Viggo, the driver for this malignant outfit, step up and do the right thing? Or is he, as his character’s name (Luzhin) suggests, merely playing games?
Intriguingly, one can glimpse the schlock beneath the surface of this fine film. With mere mortals attached, this might have been just another Godfather clone or Goodfellas riff. Trust David Cronenberg to create something unique with it. The exhilarating pace, though dictated by genre, still takes the time to linger on an actor’s expression. Indeed, Viggo Mortensen does more with those interludes than most thespians could manage with a Shakespearean soliloquy.
Much of the film’s power is derived from the tension between Mr. Knight’s tender-hearted humanism and Mr. Cronenberg’s patented lust for viscera. The lurid, scarlet throat slashes seem culled from the pages of a graphic novel yet prostitution and pole-dancing has rarely looked grubbier. A knife fight in a sauna, arguably the ne plus ultra of the director’s attempts to get under your skin, is both comic-book heightened and unspeakably sordid.
Russian viewers, it must be said, may have ample cause for complaint. Here, even the eastern bloc émigrés who aren’t killers and rapists (such as Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski who plays Ms. Watt’s opinionated uncle) are still fairly horrendous human beings.
We can live with that. It’s just that sort of movie. Besides, one is more inclined to overlook the nasty Russians than the film’s silly title. Eastern Promises? It seems more suited to a Turkish Delight commercial or Chevy Chase vehicle than a contemporary classic.