Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Eastern Promises / UK / Canada / 2007

Perhaps I was expecting a good deal more from this than the plot synopsis warranted, but as glad as I am to hear of Cronenberg’s win at the Toronto International Film Festival, I’m a mite disappointed by his film. Like quite a few others, I like A History of Violence a great deal, but mainly because of the characters and the craft of the filmmaking, not because of the suggestive portentousness of its title. As I’ve said before, I’m unconvinced that that film has any big message to deliver about the nature of violence, other than perhaps the fact that it is ugly and inevitable. In the new film, there is even less of a message to be learned, if you’re still looking for one. And yet the film’s one singularly effective scene — the visceral, nasty, and already much-touted nude fight scene — seems to exist not to advance plot or build character, but so that Cronenberg can claim, as he did in a recent New York Times article, that his treatment of violence is more real and more interested in consequence than Hollywood’s version.

If demonstrably true, this would surely not be a major achievement. But is it true? Does it even matter? Aren’t there a hundred other directors working today who are doing the same thing — shoving the nastiness of violence in our face, in closeup, so that we can’t fail to remember how unpleasant it is? Can we not all agree that it is virtually impossible for a film — much less a “thriller”, still less a Cronenberg film — to give us an unmediated, unvarnished experience of honest-to-goodness violence?

I laughed in horror at the ultimate pay-off of that scene, and while I more or less understand its overall function in the film (something about homoeroticism, betrayal, and tattoos), it lacks any of the emotional undertow in Cronenberg’s prior film’s two brilliantly staged sex scenes.

As for the rest of the film, I’m not really sure what it amounts to. The acting is excellent, even if the characters (especially Naomi Watts’) are quite inconsequential. The comic scenes, like those between Watts, her mother, and her daft Russian uncle, are executed painfully and, like Steven Knight’s earlier Dirty Pretty Things, which I sort of enjoyed, the script is less clever than it thinks it is. All in all, there is very little dread that any of the characters (especially the infant) are in any real danger. The only theme I can derive is an odd twinning of A History of Violence, insofar as the film argues that there are good sides to bad people (versus the other way around).

Still, it’s a brisk and exciting film for the most part, Viggo and Vincent Cassel are a lot of fun to watch together, and, once again, it’s only about 100 minutes long. Hardly a glowing recommendation, I know, but middling Cronenberg is still more appealing than Russell Crowe’s Glenn Ford impersonation or Jodie Foster’s Charlie Bronson.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Focus Features 35mm Print
17 Sep 2007 4:28 PM | Comments (1)

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1. Chiranjit / 23 September 2007 / 2:23 PM / URL

   Just for the sake of totally unnecessary clarification, I believe the film won the audience award at TIFF. I’m not saying the award isn’t somewhat meaningful, but the film almost had the thing locked up by having an acclaimed Canadian auteur at the helm, having its stars show up at the Gala, and promising that Mortensen would drop his towel.