Going mainstream

Sometimes it seems as though my favorite directors are going mainstream. When Tim Burton made it big with Batman and Batman Returns, I thought we had lost him for good; but in the midst of all that blockbusterishness, he also created Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Mars Attacks!, and his recent movies continue his tradition of the weird. (Oooh, look! He’s working on a feature-length version of Frankenweenie, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is in pre-production!)

But then there’s Sam Raimi, who gave us the brilliant Army of Darkness, the capstone of his Evil Dead trilogy. Raimi hit mainstream with the Spider-Man movies, and if Drag Me to Hell is any indication, his horror has gone mainstream, too. Raimi’s IMDB page indicates he has 20 projects under development. Is that humanly possible?

My latest sorrow is for David Cronenberg, a guy who was creating slipstream* movies before slipstream fiction even had a name, with gems like Videodrome and Dead Ringers, and later Naked Lunch and Crash pushing our comfort zone for what a movie should be.

But then in 2005 he teamed with Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence, a solid thriller that I found fun to watch, but fun is not what I expect from a Cronenberg movie. Interesting, uncomfortable, surprising . . . and maybe fun is fourth on the list. And in 2007, apparently happy with the collaboration, Cronenberg gave us Mortensen-as-Russian-mafiose in Eastern Promises.

You get to see all this and so much more.

The premise: London midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) delivers the baby of a 14-year-old Russian prostitute, who does not survive the delivery. Among her effects is a diary written in Russian; fortunately for the plot, Anna is the child of Russian immigrants, and has an uncle who can translate. But Uncle is a bit of a dick, so she follows a lead provided by a business card buried in the diary: she goes to Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Russian restaurateur who seems like such a nice man, especially when he’s not trying to kick the virility out of his son Kirill (French actor Vincent Cassel).

Viggo Mortensen plays Nikolai, Kirill’s friend and driver. Nikolai is portrayed as ambitious, smart, and cool, the ice cube to Kirill’s blow torch, and he’s enough of a bad boy to intrigue and frighten Anna. At the risk of dropping a few spoilers, the lack of a love scene between Anna and Kirill was one of the movie’s few surprises. That Semyon is a right bastard and Nikolai is not all he seems to be were “twists” telegraphed miles in advance.

Cronenberg fans will appreciate the movie’s gore, which included the most realistic throat-cutting depiction I have ever seen. (No, really — it’s not that easy to slit a throat, and for once we get to see that you have to work at it. I mean there’s a reason our heads don’t just pop off. All that muscle and skin and gristle.) But if you were hoping for the Russian version of The Godfather, or even a gangster movie with the depth of, say, Miller’s Crossing, then you’re going to come away disappointed.

Chief among the film’s deficiencies were a lack of character development and inadequately developed motivation. Who is Nikolai and why is he taking these risks? For that matter, who is Semyon and why (other than the fact that he is a crime boss) does he have enemies back in Mother Russia? Even the movie’s central killing — of Soyka, son and made man from a rival Chechen family — receives only hints of an explanation. If well developed characters have six layers**, we are provided only the first one or two.

And some things are just plain inexcusable. There’s a vicious, bloody, nekkid-butt-waving and wiener-flopping fight scene in a steam bath, which Karen found objectionable for its poor choreography. I agree with her but I was more offended by the premise that the bad guys would mistake Nikolai for Kirill because of his star tattoos (sign of a made man). True, they’ve never met Kirill and don’t know what he looks like, but surely they would recognize tattoos that are less than two days old? And this is a pivotal moment, plot-wise.

Absent from Eastern Promises is that slipstream feeling of strangeness. No, I wasn’t expecting Nikolai’s hand to morph into a gun, nor did I expect him to pull a cup of borscht from the middle of his chest. But aside from some high stakes gore, the movie never takes chances.

Cronenberg is working on a sequel, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the movie. By movie’s end (SPOILER), driver and dirty work guy Nikolai has risen to seat of power in this family, much as cadet James T. Kirk gloms onto the captain’s chair near the end of the recent Star Trek movie. (The ascension is every bit as unbelievable.) Will Nikolai and Anna meet again and relieve our sense of coitus interruptus? Count on it.

I enjoyed Eastern Promises, found it “fun,” especially Armin Mueller-Stahl’s sweet and sparkly Russian grandpa with a heart of bile. I’m just not so sure that “fun” is what I want from David Cronenberg.

D.

*From Sterling’s article:

Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply
makes you feel very strange; the way that living in
the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are
a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this
kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but
that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires
an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and
argument, we will call these books “slipstream.”

But Mr. Sterling, Novels of PMS does have a certain je ne sais quoi.

**I just made that up. But it sounds about right, doesn’t it?

Walnut, June 12, 2010. Category: At the movies, Reviews.

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