Eastern Promises (2007, UK/Canadian)

Warning – this post is all about the end of Eastern Promises, so I’d only suggest reading it if you’ve seen the movie or don’t care about being spoiled.

Overall, Eastern Promises felt like a practice run for A History of Violence. Many of the same themes are explored, but not with the depth seen in Violence. One thing in particular really bugged me about Eastern, and ended up impacting my feelings about the movie as a whole. At the end of Violence Cronenberg treats the audience to a view of the normal American family sitting down to dinner. Everything looks perfect, but if you’ve sat through the entire film, you know that this is just a veneer for the ugliness underneath. It’s a great moment, and one that he can’t recapture (or doesn’t choose to) in Eastern.

The last scenes of Eastern strive for a similar family structure. At the water’s edge, right after tipping the balance of power and rescuing the baby at the center of the film’s conflict, Nikkolai (Viggo Mortensen) and Anna (Naomi Watts) share a kiss, the baby held closely between them. It’s another perfect picture of family unity, but here, with the reveal that Nikkolai’s character is more good guy than bad, it feels like a suture, like a triumph, and not the hollow victory at the end of Violence.

What’s really problematic is what comes after. Anna has apparently taken the baby in as Nikkolai returns to the Russian underworld to destroy it from within. They are separate, but the illusion of the perfect family remains. Anna raises the baby with the help of the older generation – her English mother and Russian uncle – and all is sweetness and light. Too much so, I thought, as the whole thing is skewed so gender-normative that it doesn’t gel with the rest of the film, and particularly with Anna’s character. Throughout the movie, Anna has been the tough broad – unafraid to challenge men, riding the streets of London on her father’s motorcycle, and dressed in denim and leather when she’s not wearing her work scrubs. True, she is a midwife, and she has lost both a baby and a fiancé, but there is nothing about Anna’s character that demonstrates this late show of femininity. In that final scene, Anna is dressed in a light-colored sundress patterned with flowers, and she takes the baby out into a sunny courtyard to play. That single kiss with Nikkolai has changed her, rendered her softer – I missed the ass-kicking Anna of the movie, and didn’t feel that this motherly, wifely figure was any sort of real replacement.

I found it somewhat odd that Cronenberg made this choice – his use of the wife in Violence was nowhere near as simple, and I can’t recall another female figure of his who has been reduced in this way. In general, I enjoyed the bulk of Eastern - the performances are strong (particularly the magnificent Armin Mueller-Stahl), and the whole thing rips along at a great pace. The fact that it lacks the depth of Violence doesn’t render it any less enjoyable, but the easy out at the end certainly does.