Eastern Promises

***1/2 Stars

David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises marks the first time the director left his home country of Canada to make a film. Shot in London, this unique crime thriller is an interesting study of characters, caught in lives of hidden sadness and unfulfilling sacrifices.

Viggo Mortensen is in top form as Nikolai Luzhin, a Russian-born driver for the Vory V Zakone (the Russian Mafia, literally meaning "Thieves in Law"). To prepare for his role, Mortensen traveled alone to Moscow to study the language and lives of the Vory V Zakone. This group tells their story through tattoos (which turns out to very important in the story) and each one signifies a stepping stone of their life in the mob. You will see Mortensen covered in these, while also perfecting Nikolai's Siberian accent.

Nikolai, like George Clooney's Michael Clayton, is a janitor. He cleans up messes when things get dirty. However, Eastern Promises has a much darker setting. While Clayton took care of lobbying and hit-and-runs, Nikolai is cutting up bodies and discarding them properly. Through his ordeals, Nikolai comes across an innocent midwife named Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) who slips into the lives of people she shouldn't be involved with. When a fourteen year old mother dies while giving birth on Anna's shift, she is forced to find a home for the child. She comes across the girl's diary. Written in Russian, Anna is forced to find someone to translate it. She finds a card in the diary for the Trans-Saberian restaurant owned by Seymon, the boss of the family Nikolai works for. She wonders over to find some clues and he immediately agrees to help her translate the diary. Why is he so willing to help her? Who is this man? The past of all of these characters are intertwined in a story of interpersonal connections inside dialogue of social utterances.

Eastern Promises is more mainstream and has a similar style to Cronenberg's last directorial effort A History of Violence. Both tell a small segment of a bigger story, like a middle chapter of something we have already seen. It digs deep into scenarios that would be deleted from an ordinary crime thriller. For example, we see the film shot in Nikolai's and Anna's perspective, witnessing the lives of a Mafia family losing grips with reality and tangling itself into inner hysteria. Both lead characters are world's apart but both understand what they have to do. Anna is not just an ordinary woman caught in a web of bad people. She is trying to right a wrong similar to regrets of her past. She in fact suffered a stillborn birth years prior, giving her the thrust to find this baby a rightful owner.

Viggo Mortensen brings his character alive with the intent of showing a human, not a figure. Although Nikolai is externally fearless, he is having doubts because of his past and what made him get to where he is. Will he run away or finish what he started? The ending's setup begins to turn melodramatic, but a last minute fix steers it to a place you won't see coming. A twist of fate brings everything to a rightfully fitting finale.