Eastern Promises – So much more than just a gangster movie

Article first published as DVD Review: Eastern Promises: So Much More Than Just a Gangster Movie on Blogcritics.

First, a confession. I am a huge Cronenberg fan. I like his violently red vision in classics like The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981), but even more the eerily disturbing Dead Ringers (1988), Crash (1996) and Spider (2002). Naked Lunch (1991) and Videodrome (1983) have their own hallucinogenic lunacy that disturbs in a different way.

Eastern Promises begins with a birth and a death, coinciding and overlapping. Tatiana (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), a young Russian girl, stumbles into a pharmacy begging for help. She promptly passes out in a puddle of her own blood. She is rushed to the hospital where the midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) is one of the medical team working on her. Tatiana does not survive the birth. She leaves behind a child and a diary written in Russian which Anna tries to use to track down any family the girl might have.

Anna unwittingly stumbles into the violent criminal Russian underworld of London. She enlists the help of a seemingly respectable Russian restaurant owner, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) to help her translate the diary. Little does she know that Semyon is actually responsible for Tatiana’s condition and that he is a part of the Vory v Zakonye (“thieves in law”) a criminal organization.

Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen) is working as a driver for the organization, and he is close to both Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Anna lands herself squarely in the middle of more trouble than she can handle when she starts getting involved with Semyon, not knowing that Tatiana was working in one of his brothels and that Semyon is the one who impregnated her.

Nikolai is actually not what he seems to be at first glance, either. It turns out that he is working under cover to try and infiltrate the Vory, an operation that has been a long time in the making and which is now in part jeopardized by Anna’s involvement.

This could so easily have been another bad-accented gangster exploitation movie if handled by another director, but instead it has depth and weight. Every action is underscored by a wealth of background work and there’s a fullness to the telling that shows how much is left unsaid.

Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel both impress and come across as completely plausible Russian gangsters. The lines spoken in Russian sound true enough and their broken English rings just as true, which is a relief. The interaction between their two characters Nikolai and Kirill is underscored by a kind of romance and seduction that is really interesting to watch. Kirill’s troubled relationship with his father is of the variety you would expect to see in a Greek play, and all this comes into play in the action, but with the sliding subtlety of a master craftsman’s handling. Naomi Watts is completely believable as a midwife and her character has depth and a richness to it that isn’t common for either the genre, nor for female characters as a whole.

The action starts in medias res and it ends the same way and it actually took me a while to settle on why. This is not Anna’s story, or Kirill’s, or even Nikolai’s. This is the story of the fourteen year old Tatiana, whose diary runs as a red thread in her voice-over through the action and even rounds it off when we get the closing shot of Nikolai at Semyon’s restaurant. But even more than that, this is actually the baby’s story. Tatiana’s child is the main focus here, and that is actually so cleverly done that it underscores the violence and gives it a human resonance. Kirill’s moment of anagnorisis comes when he is gently persuaded to not kill the child and gives in to Nikolai.

There are many things to commend this movie, little moments like when Semyon demonstrates his ability to play the fiddle to two of his young nieces, or when Nikolai handles the post-mortem dismemberment of a rival gangster with the ease of someone who has done it all before, or the fight sequence in the Turkish bath where Nikolai takes on two fully dressed rival gangsters completely buck naked making him so blatantly vulnerable you wince for him when he gets thrown across the room. There are other things too, like the young man who is obviously of diminished capacity, but who kills and gets killed because he can’t grasp the full extent of his situation. There are many things like that and that is more than enough to make this a well above par gangster movie.

Eastern Promises is directed by David Cronenberg staring Naomi Watts (Anna), Viggo Mortensen (Nikolai), Vincent Cassel (Kirill), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Semyon), Josef Altin (Ekrem), Mina E. Mina (Azim), Aleksander Mikic (Soyka), Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse (Tatiana), Sinéad Cusack (Helen), Jerzy Skolimowski (Stephan).

Albino Alligator

Albino Alligator (1996) is actually directed by Kevin Spacey.

It stars Matt Dillon as Dova, Gary Sinise as his brother Milo, William Fitchner as Law. These three guys are trying to burglar a warehouse of some description, but trip the alarm. As they try to get away their car is mistaken for another criminal’s and they end up taking refuge in a bar – one that does not have a backdoor.

The botched burglary quickly turns into a siege situation when the police surrounds it.

The few people in the bar are Janet Boudreau played by Faye Dunaway, Danny (Skeet Ulrich), Jack (John Spencer), Guy Foucard (Viggo Mortensen and Dino (M. Emmet Walsh).

This is basically a set-piece. One we’re in the bar, Dino’s, we’re not getting out. It takes place in New Orleans, but we don’t really get to see much of the city, which is too bad, but there you go.

One of the reasons why I mention the cast so specifically is that this is a set piece. It might as well have been played out on stage. It’s got that close and intense ensemble focus. And it is character driven to an extent that really takes a solid cast to pull off. And they do. Oh, boy, do they ever.

I’m not surprised that the material is treated this way at all. You’ve got an actor turned director at work here which means the focus is going to be on the performances and I really like that.

This is not a big action splash, though there is plenty of violence and blood. But the main focus is on the dynamic between the characters and this is one of those things that takes so many twists and loops and doubles back on itself so you can’t really not get sucked into it. The pacing is spectacular. It’s like a tightening fist that eases off a little only to get a better grip to squeaze all the harder.

There’s not a single moment of dull transport anywhere in any of this. Every moment is a moment unto itself and there’s a sense of generosity among the actors where they help build each other up instead of trying to outstage each other.

Fitchner’s portrayal of Law as a sociaopath Lizard-king sprawled and lazy one moment, violent and unpredictable the next it down right chilling. Fay Dunaway’s Janet is the tough cookie who has seen a few things and will do whatever it takes to get herself and her boy out alive. Right from the first get-go when the three outlaws come through the door and wave a gun at her she takes it all in her stride, and it’s no accident that she is smart-mouthing Dillion’s character while framed by a Humprey Bogart poster. She’s got moxy.

The interaction between an increasingly weakened Milo (Sinise) and an increasingly boxed-in and scared Dova (Dillon) is also extremely well played. And they’re starting from a bad place, trapped and growing more desperate by the moment. Now, as brothers they’re obviously different, but they’ve also got that slightly twisted loyalty that means Dova can promise never,  never to hurt his brother in one moment and then point a gun at his head the next. And Milo is the voice of reason the whole way through. Obviously intelligent and with a very clear line between what he will and will not do. He emphatically does not want to kill anyone. Dova is more of a pragmatic moralist and Law, well, he plainly doesn’t give a fuck. He only wants to be sure that he is not going back to prison.

Guy (Viggo Mortensen) is sat in a corner for much of the action, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there, a sly tilt to his eyes occasionally until you get the next piece of information on his character that sparks the action off in a new direction.

You know right from the get go that this is not going to end well.

That being said you really have to hold on, because there’s really no way of predicting the many spectacular ways in which it will end badly for all involved. You keep oscillating back and forth on who will be left standing, if anyone at all.

Every character has his/her own story and their own back-story which plays into the action in integral ways. Little things that seem like off hand comments about coffee or shooting pool turn into something bigger later down the line with the kind of icy precision you’re used to from Hitchcock. It makes it necessary for the viewer to pay attention. Again, I like that.

Visually, the camera glides around in a overtly scenic way in the opening sequence, but again, once we get inside the bar it pretty much stays out of the way… close-ups are used in a way that focuses on the emotional state of the characters, but it actually keeps to the old rules of decorum, carefully averting it’s eyes from the bloodier scenes. Just as you might suspect, that makes it all worse. It’s stylish and smart and handled with a great deal of intelligence, but for some reason I totally expected that from Spacey.

I like the overall impression and I like the way the subject matter is treated and the actors all do a very good job. I hate to be so damned agreeable about it all, but yeah, it is that good. And then some actually.

Watch it. You kind of have to.

Mule