Review of Eastern Promises (2007) by Jackt — 27 Sep 2007

I finally saw David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises," which is a dirty good time, and a few things struck me. Naomi Watts would have been the ideal woman for Alfred Hitchcock. She plays a British nurse looking the family of dead Russian girl amid the mob, and there's something less-than-classic about her face and modern about her independence.

She's like this perfectly woven garment of emotional temperatures -- hot and cold all the time. The hot part has never come naturally to Nicole Kidman, who's got the mechanics of Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, and Tippi Hedren (chilly, cold, frozen).

Watts evokes them in a more organically intelligent way. She seems to be feeling and thinking, especially in this movie, which requires her to be defensively tough and a little naive at the same time.

Sorry I'm not making this entirely clear, but Cronenberg seems to get that Watts has an internal universe -- she's the Hitchcock heroine remixed. He also understands that Viggo Mortensen is the most sexually alive man not currently doing porn.

Mortensen is one of those actors who gets more convincing, more soulful with age (he'll be 49 next month). Between this movie and "A History of Violence," Cronenberg really sees Mortensen as an intensely erotic figure (he plays a mob family's ornately tattooed driver).

The movie purports to be about Russian gangsters in London, but like "A History of Violence," "Eastern Promises" is more interesting for what's beneath the surfaces. And like the other movie, that usually culminates in some bundling of sex, violence, and Viggo.

Here, there's a brawl in a bathhouse between Mortensen and two goons that's one of the most astounding fight sequences I've ever seen. Both the sexual context and Mortensen's nudity are neutralized - and yet unmistakably present.

The grunting, slapping of flesh on the tiles, explosive exhalations, and brute force are more visceral than erotic (it's way more excruciating than it ever is arousing). And yet Cronenberg jokingly refuses to stop teasing us with the eroticism while astounding you with the brutality, the way a bloodied Mortensen crawls across bodies.

It's loaded -- a brilliant, unspoken mini-essay on what movie violence can be and often essentially is: a bunch of dudes rolling around on the floor.