By Armond White

Eastern Promises
Directed by David Cronenberg


The big set-piece in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises takes place in a Turkish bath where Russian mobster Nikolai (Viggo Mortenson) lays waste to two knife-wielding Chechen goons—and hides his genitalia at the same time. (Why he’s ambidickstrous!) The audience and I laughed at the scene’s calculated, eye-stabbing climax. Not roused by horror, we exercised a savvy movie-watcher’s reflex. Cronenberg’s blood-and-pus grisliness has long stopped being surprising or startling; it’s lost any power to disturb and now is just an effect.

This means Eastern Promises is a pretty hollow viewing experience. It deals with the ugly life choices facing Eastern immigrants in the West (London) but seems more contrived than truthful. The script was written by Steve Knight, who had already exploited this subject in Dirty Pretty Things and then risen above it in Amazing Grace. But Cronenberg takes Knight’s sociological fascination and twists it into exploitation movie huggermugger. Trouble is, he’s done this kind of lurid exaggeration for so long that his grindhouse tricks have no kick. Instead, they have dread-filled “significance.” Look how gruesome the human body is! Look how gruesome human beings are! Paul Verhoeven or Brian De Palma would make you laugh and think; Cronenberg makes his fans feel “smart” at the clichés they’ve swallowed.

Too bad Cronenberg didn’t get the Dirty Pretty Things script; that story about illegal trafficking in body parts might have been ideal for him. Instead, Eastern Promises leans heavily on the sentimentality of immigrant fear and degradation. Yet, it seems the only reason this story starts with midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) delivering the baby of a teenage Russian-immigrant sex slave is so that Cronenberg can treat us to the sight of a glazed fetus. (It’s narrative décor.) Nikolai is the heart of this story—how he turns himself into a killing machine, frets for Mother Russia and secretly seeks a good life. Anna’s a drag; her attempt to protect an orphaned infant isn’t credible enough for a director who professes familiarity with blood and perversion. All the spilt blood in Eastern Promises turns into sap as Cronenberg covers up Nikolai’s treachery with Anna’s maternal instinct. By soft-pedaling Nikolai’s mean streak, Cronenberg ignores the hardest facts of life; he ain’t so tough—or deep—after all.

Cronenberg has become the predictable fave of post-adolescent movie taste, in which Grand Guignol is no longer enjoyed for its ghoulishness but is loaded with simplistic social and psychological freight. That explains the foolish acclaim for his last movie, A History of Violence—a comic book-based thriller spinning the fashionable notion that violence was as American as apple pie. Actually, the movie was Tarantino without wit—grimly pessimistic to suit post-9/11 masochism. Eastern Promises’ masochism feels half-hearted, yet it’s shrewdly perverse, planned to excite that sophomoric thrill for what’s dark and hopeless. Cronenberg holds on the scene where Anna cradles the baby at a nearby dock, freezing it into a film-noir frieze—as if cutting the heartstrings he’s strenuously pulling. I laughed here, too, at the obvious demonstration of Cronenberg’s catering to hipster nihilism.

The immigrants who go West in Eastern Promises are summarized by Nikolai’s confession: “I am dead already. I live in the zone,” says Viggo Mortensen, whose top hat pompadour suggests a Hollywood version of a Kaurismaki character. Naomi Watts is simply the year’s blandest heroine. It’s clear that Cronenberg isn’t exploring alienation; he’s exploiting Western elitism, denying the hope immigrants bring to a new land such as Spielberg complexly dramatized in The Terminal. That’s it: Cronenberg’s cliché noir has no distinction, except that it’s anti-The Terminal.