Eastern Promises (2007)

Brief: After a fourteen year-old girl dies on her table, midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) takes a special interest in getting the girl's Russian diary translated, so Anna can return the baby to the girl's family. When her Russian uncle, Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski), initially refuses to translate the diary, Anna takes it to Russian restaurant whose card she found between the pages. The proprietor, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), offers to translate diary, but encounters with Semyon's son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and his driver, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), convince Anna's family that she has accidentally fallen in with the Russian mob.

That makes it sound like Anna's the protagonist, at least at first, but the movie slowly shifts its focus to Nikolai's upward mobility within the family and is a lot better off for it. But we'll get back to that.

I know I made it seem like director David Cronenberg and I had parted ways, but I had heard so many good things about his latest (as well as about him as director generally) that I had to check it out. I realized that it was a good thing when Emily and I turned to each other at the end and agreed that this was by far the most coherent Cronenberg narrative we had ever seen.

Working from a script by Steven Knight, who had previously visited London's underworld and immigrant experience 2002's similarly themed Dirty Pretty Things, Cronenberg temporarily drops his exploration of the nexus of sex and violence (at least on-screen) to focus on his other pet theme: identity. Both how we develop it and how we justify it over time are central to plot within the Russian mafia and to Mortensen's character's development in particular. We learn early on that your tattoos tell your life story in mob and without them you're nobody, and Nikolai's steep climb to get his three stars (the Russian mafia equivalent of being a made man) is as compelling and tense as any story I have seen on-screen.

Much more so than Anna's story. For all Watts' good work (I like her more every time I see her), Anna is so pathologically naive that at a certain point it becomes difficult to sympathize with her even though she is trying to do right by the baby. She makes such obviously stupid choices that it's a damn good sight things turn out the way they do. I don't want to give anything away, but, honestly, Anna could have benefited from having to learn a lesson or two. Again, that's on Cronenberg and Knight and not on Watts, who is radiant in her fierce protection of the baby.

Frequent collaborator Howard Shore's score work elegantly with the piece. The way he develops his themes and variations slowly, rarely completing his musical thought until the end, is well suited to the way a Cronenberg narrative unfolds.

Maybe Cronenberg and I can come to some sort of an agreement instead of an impasse. We'll have to wait and see with his next picture. Until then, B+