Eastern Promises
Russian mobsters: cute and cuddly they ain't
In their 2005 teaming "A History of Violence," Director David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen created an interesting and daunting paradox: it was a film about violence that seemed to want to deglamorize violence. That film's central premise was that violence is ugly and has a tendency to come back to haunt those who perpetrate it. The paradox comes in the fact that the violence in the film, though brutal and ugly, also has an attractive cathartic effect that is undeniable. It's hard not to cheer when Tom Stall (Mortensen's everyman character in the film) expertly dispatches group after group of very bad men to their logical ends. I never was sure if this attraction/repulsion was part of the point or not.

I think that dichotomy is solved in Cronenberg and Mortensen's follow-up collaboration. There is nothing attractive at all about the violence in "Eastern Promises," and in fact, there is not even really that much of it. One early murder is so cowardly and brutal that I spent most of the film hoping that there would not be any more. Cronenberg always was the grandmaster of building an atmosphere of dread in a film, and dread is a predominant emotion throughout the movie.

Mortensen stars as Nikolai, a dapper but dangerous driver for a Russian mobster. Mortensen plays the role to perfection. He is outwardly a little friendly, a little playful, but just one look at him and you know he is trouble; there is a bottom layer to him that is as forbidden and icy as a Siberian winter. He is very hard to read; stone killer, or decent guy at heart? We only know that his sense of decency extends at least as far as to issue a warning: "Stay away from people like me," he tells Anna (Naomi Watts); it is advice that extends beyond Anna, I think, to audiences who always seem fascinated by gangsters. Stay away; don't try to probe the inner workings of his mind, find his secret humanity or hidden depths; the best plan is to just stay away.

But Anna is on a mission that she can't abandon. A midwife at a hospital, she delivered a baby to a young girl who died in childbirth. A diary written in Russian is the only clue to the girl's identity, along with a business card to a Russian restaurant. Hoping to spare the baby from getting lost in foster care, Anna stumbles into ground zero for the Russian mob in London.

Soon, her attempts to help the baby set several rows of dominos clinking over, click click click, with Nikolai falling into place as the only person who can prevent disaster. But is Nikolai the helping sort, or does he have plans of his own that could be just as deadly?

Mortensen is amazing, shifting seamlessly through a performance that has him speaking in thickly accented English and various flavors of Russian. His Russian-accented English was so convincing, it seemed like he learned to speak Russian, then went back and relearned English from a Russian perspective. But the performance goes beyond a master class in dialects. So much of the performance is not in what he reveals but what he keeps hidden. In spite of his outward show of being a good guy at heart, accept him as such at your peril.

Naomi Watts is a fine actress, but I don't feel her part as Anna was as developed as much it might have been. For the most part, I felt, she is relegated to playing the standard plucky heroine, though she discharges the role well. Armin Muelller-Stahl pulls off a neat trick in his performance as Semyon, the restaurateur/mobster. Semyon undoubtedly sees himself as a figure of Shakespearean complexity, full of contradictions. On his first meeting with Anna, he runs the gamut of standard clichés: from gourmet cook to mild mannered gentleman, to gentle mentor to a child learning to play the violin, he tries to paint himself as a man of cultured manners and tastes. But his act quickly grows old, and his cultured disguise is really more on the level of a snake trying to hide itself behind a fake mustache. The more Semyon holds on to his pretense of culture and depth, the more ridiculous and contemptible he becomes, and Mueller-Stahl walks that line admirably.

In spite of occasional popular success, the films of David Cronenberg are probably an acquired taste for most people. He and his films have built their reputation as being "really out there." His themes and style have seemed to operate in all defiance of any real world allegiance. In his 1991 film "Naked Lunch," Bill Lee, the film's hero states what might have been a perfect summation of Cronenberg's personal philosophy "Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to." And indeed, the viewer must often give himself up to the films entirely if they are to work at all. One of his favorite themes is transformation, usually in horrible degradation of mutated flesh and sinew in which the essence of what it means to be human is pushed to the limits. At what point in the process of transformation do his heros cease to be human and become something else?

Ironically, in his last two films, exploring the world of mobsters, Cronenberg seems to have found a genre that perfectly enables him to bring his thematic obsessions to earth. Horror is inherent in the world of the mobsters; no need to go in search of a metaphor. Mobsters also like to view themselves as being in charge of their world and makers of their own fate, but such belief is delusion. Nikolai, in spite of his chilly competence, is also playing with forces he may not understand as completely as he thinks he does; he could be undergoing a transformation every bit as dramatic as that imposed on Jeff Goldblum in "The Fly."

Cronenberg's films are likely to be a bit grim for some viewers, and he, thankfully, does not shirk from showing the mobsters as being the completely repellent creatures they are. There is a scene in a brothel house that was especially creepy. I don't know where lines are crossed for people, or why; a couple of people in the audience walked out of the film during the brothel scene, which is the only reason I bring it up.

But the film is also less violent on a quantitative scale than most typical summer movie fare. It's infinitely less violent than "Die Harder," and more people die in the first few minutes of the third "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie than in the whole of "Eastern Promises," yet audiences flock to those movies without a moment's thought. I don't pretend to understand it.