I finally got a chance to see Eastern Promises. I’m very disappointed. After two years of having it recommended to me, perhaps I had built up too many expectations. A few comments;

1. Vigo Mortensen did a great job with a great role. It held the film together.

2. Naomi Watts did a terrible job with a mediocre role. She looked like she couldn’t act her way out of a Fritos bag in this movie. I liked her in Mulholland Drive, but she was playing the same character, although a poorly written one, the same way in a completely different movie.

3. This is one of the most clear cut moral worlds I have ever seen passed off as a complex one. Like Paul Haggis’s Oscar winning travesty Crash, Eastern Promises offers the viewer a seemingly complex arena that wields moral messages like bludgeons. There is little doubt in our minds after the first five minutes who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Vigo’s character being revealed as an undercover agent only affirms this.

The most egregious example are the scenes with the diary of the Prostitute, (which by the way is often the only thing keeping Naomi Watt’s character, which in my opinion could have been removed, around for long chunks of the film). No one assumes that the life of a naive eastern European woman turned prostitute is easy (for a heartbreaking, brutal and moving treatment of this subject see Lilya 4 Ever by Lukas Moodysson), but this felt like it was beating me over the head with a squeaky mallet. All scenes with the diary should have been cut. They were obvious to the point of condescension. Enough.

4. The set design. Way too clean, it looks like you could eat off every other surface in the movie. More time should have been spent.

The greatest strength of this film is the world it chose to explore. It is a fascinating, morally complex, difficult arena. That said they shot all of it in the ass. The weak godfather references (Vincent Cassel comes off like a pathetic mix of Fredo and Sonny), combined with cheap comic relief (Naomi Watts’s father) and the sheer black and whiteness of everything (did anyone think Vigo was going to turn out to be a bad guy?) and the diary (ahhhh!) ruin everything.

5. Many scenes where nothing really happens.

William Goldman, in his wonderful book Which Lie Did I Tell, talks about why movie heroes need to have mystery. He gives an example of one of the worst scenes he ever wrote, revisions for the Ghost and the Darkness, which is still a solid film. He was forced to make Michael Douglas’s character Remington (originally named Redbeard) more sympathetic by giving him a sad history, i.e.

Goldman says this is bad because it kills the mystery of the main character, which I think is a valid point. There are two other more serious flaws with the weepy background.

1. It slows down the story.

2. It often disrespects the audience.

3. It’s boring to sit watching characters talk about other characters.

Eastern Promises is full of expository scenes. Just because a film is a drama doesn’t mean that characters need to have long sessions where they explain each other’s lives for the audience’s benefit. It’s boring. I’m not against revealing character, but it’s usually a waste of time. I don’t need to know that Naomi Watts’ character had a miscarriage, if she’s a good enough actress I will know it or feel it intuitively through her performance. Characters reveal themselves to us through what they do, which is far more interesting than hearing stories about them. I think the need to explain everything, from the tatoos onward, comes from insecurity about the world and a disrespect for the audience’s understanding of it. If I want a detailed analysis of Russian gangsters I can look on Wikipedia. I generally go to see a movie to see characters acting in order to achieve a goal. Through their relative failure or success I learn  something about the complex world I live in. Storytelling built on white hat black hat morality will last about as long as an economy supported by imaginary money.

I have a lot of respect for Cronenberg. He is a pioneer and a visionary. I thought Naked Lunch was better than the book. A friend of mine said that he though Eastern Promises was alright, but it wasn’t a Cronenberg film. Although 40 million dollars have now been spent, I would take it as a complement.