Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
Director: David Cronenberg
With Eastern Promises, the Oscar season has officially begun in India, and this film fits Academy Awards 20088217;s mood of unapologetically grim dramas.
Over steaming dishes, shining cutlery, elaborate dinners and a rainy Christmas at a popular London restaurant, Cronenberg builds a tale of inescapable menace and improbable humanity involving a generous restaurant owner-cum-ruthless Russian mafia lord Mueller-Stahl, his miserable son Cassel and an underling who is cleverly stepping into the gap Mortensen.
The shades of Godfather are hard to miss here, though the Vory V Zakone family is of course much smaller than the Corleones.
In the midst of this, a midwife working at the local hospital Watts literally rides in. She has stumbled onto their secrets thanks to a diary she recovered from a dying 14-year-old. It leads Anna first to the restaurant Trans-Siberia, and then to the dark world of the Russian/Chechen mafia where girls from the former Soviet Union are lured to the West with promises and then sucked into prostitution and exploitation.
The girl whose diary Anna recovers died during child birth. It is while trying to find out who to hand over the child to that she gets involved in the matter. Having lost her own baby to a miscarriage, Anna feels particular affinity with the girl.
Cronenberg conveys effectively the collision between the two worlds, while working on the notion that 8220;all monsters are sentimental and have some kind of relationship to a moral compass8221;. So even as he chops the fingers of a man they have just ordered killed, Mortensen8217;s Nikolai or even his bosses don8217;t just finish Anna off and take the diary.
On one side is the mafia boss and his family, and on the other, Anna8217;s mother and uncle as determined to protect her. Cassel8217;s Kirill, drunk and desperate to show he is worth his family name, is all about his father, as much as Anna in her delicate state counts on her mother.
As for Mortensen, who has been nominated for best actor for his role, he looks as different as he possibly ever will from The Lord of the Rings. The heroic, luminous Aragorn of Rings is oily, dark and cold here. He conveys little by way of emotion, knows what he has to do, and goes quietly about doing it.
Dependent on Kirill to get him into the mob, Nikolai indulges his stupidities and then quietly, as roles change, shows who is the boss.
Thanks to the Censors, you may not get to see parts of that, though. Scenes have been inexplicably and abruptly chopped here, while the other two releases of the week 8212; Rambo IV and Aliens and Predators 2 8212; apparently went about toting up bodies.
While Mortensen has got the meatier role and now the Oscar nod, it would be unfair not to acknowledge Cassel8217;s performance, always trying to be what he is not. When the cards are all on the table, watch as he almost gratefully rests his head on Nikolai8217;s shoulders.
