Promises Kept

Several weeks ago as I was driving away from the movie theater (I've already forgotten which movie it was), I tuned in to CBC Radio as I often do, and was treated to an interview with David Cronenberg about his new film, Eastern Promises. At first I was pleased, until I heard the director discussing what sounded like important plot details. Not only do I hate spoilers -- in fact, I had to stop reading certain websites after I was spoiled for both The Sixth Sense and Fight Club -- but I had to wonder why the director would do something as self-defeating as reveal seemingly the most important plot element, several weeks before the film was even released.

I needn't have worried. The sexuality of the character Kirill, while pivotal to the events of the film, isn't actually the point as I had incorrectly concluded. Instead, it turns out to be the fulcrum that, in a way I couldn't have guessed, has fundamentally altered the relationship between two other major characters: Semyon, the deeply evil crime patriarch played with grave dignity by Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Nikolai, the self-contained and dangerous limousine driver and ex-con played by Viggo Mortenson. The catalyst for the change is the diary left behind by a 14-year-old Russian girl who dies giving birth to a baby whose father is unknown. When Anna, a British hospital midwife played by Naomi Watts, attempts to use the diary to locate the baby's family, she unwittingly places herself and her own family on a collision course with Semyon, the Russian crime boss who has moved his family's activities, and their secrets, to London.

I won't say another word about the plot, except to observe that the culminating bathhouse fight deserves what appears to be its rapidly escalating reputation among connoisseurs of movie violence. Lots of films have killings and acts of brave or reckless or unavoidable self-defense, but relatively few convey such a visceral sense of the will to survive, or the vulnerability of human flesh in the face of attempts to damage it. It's easy to decry movie violence, but if more films were this honest about the costs of that violence, there might be less need to worry about those costs in real life.