Interview. David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen.

"If an audience is seeing a movie to live another life - which I think is one of the attractions of seeing movies; you get to be out of your own life and live some other life that maybe you [wouldn't] ever really want to live but you're curious about - so, I'm saying, if you're a Nikolai in the movie, then you're going to experience this. I'm not going to throw it away, do it off camera, and do it frivolously. All the hard work and the difficulty of killing someone, if that's what this character has to do, I want you to feel it and see it."

That's David Cronenberg, talking to Michael Guillén at the main site about his new film, Eastern Promises. Also on hand to talk about this character, Nikolai, is the man who plays him, Viggo Mortensen.

Updated through 9/16.

Updates: "Eastern Promises (a flaccid title for such a taut film) has some sensational set pieces," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "But at heart it's a two-family drama... The movie doesn't rise above its genre conventions so much as it burrows into them, finding complexities and contradictions in the standard tropes."

"Violence is to threat, in his movies, as punch line is to joke: a source of glee to his fans, although with every year I find it less amusing," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Does it honestly drive home the malice of Semyon, Nikolai, and their rivals to see a knife blade gouging a throat, or does the image not pride itself on its flourish of Guignol and thus divert attention from the main business of Eastern Promises, which is to delve into the spiritual sump where these characters live?"

Mortensen's "character here is nowhere near as layered as in A History of Violence, and neither is the movie," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Eastern Promises is finally conventional, even sentimental - or as sentimental as a film in which a knife gets driven through someone's eyeball into his brain in a gruelingly extended medium close-up can be. There's nothing comparable to the mirror-image sex scenes between Mortensen and Maria Bello that anchored History - only a lot of [Naomi] Watts trudging back and forth with that damn diary-McGuffin."

"The story is clear-cut, which is something of a bummer after the heady, one-two punch of the serpentine Spider and iconic splendor of A History of Violence, but Cronenberg's exquisite framing provides the film with arresting psychological dimensions; only Polanski is better at framing the world along diagonal lines, but Cronenberg's images are more insinuating, leaving one feeling wary of what may be bubbling beneath the surface of things," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

Online listening tip. At IFC News, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss the film.

Updates, 9/12: "I've said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run.... As slick as it is, Eastern Promises could, like A History of Violence, almost pass for an exceptionally well-made B-movie." And Nathan Lee interviews Cronenberg.

"David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises is a failed film," declares Andrew Tracy at Reverse Shot. "And it fails for a reason which many critics consider banal and irrelevant (a good indication of its continuing truth): the script is Bad."

"[T]his isn't a mystery story so much as a cool look at the extremes individuals will go to to achieve an end," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Containing one of the most cinematically virtuosic set pieces of Cronenberg's career - a bone-crunching battle in a bathhouse that Mortensen (whose performance is entirely remarkable) plays in the nude - Eastern Promises is nonetheless one of Cronenberg's subtlest, most insinuating pictures."

"Without spoiling too much, Eastern Promises plays out exactly like A History of Violence in reverse," writes Martin Tsai at cinemaattraction. "Nothing wrong with that, since A History of Violence is such a triumphant meta-thriller."

"It's essentially an efficient gangland mini-saga, dressed up in stylish, not always well-fitting Cronenberg clothes," writes Noel Murray. Also at the AV Club: "I couldn't dig up much behind the surface, which is either my failing or his," writes Scott Tobias.

For the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Kimberley Chun interviews Cronenberg (and has more at Pixel Vision), while Michelle Devereaux talks with Mortensen; and Gina Piccalo talks with Mortensen for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 9/14: "I often think about David Lynch when I think about David Cronenberg, and vice versa," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "These two cult heroes are so dissimilar in so many ways, yet they attract similar audiences and draw their water, so to speak, from the same deep wells. Both are informed simultaneously by classic genre movies and by European art film. Both draw on the subconscious in their movies, both are attracted to the grotesque at least as much as the sublime. (You could say that both find each element in the other one.) If you ask me, Lynch could use a little more of Cronenberg's cool control, and Cronenberg could use a dose of Lynch's intuitive dream logic. But that's a topic for another time." At any rate, he, too, has an interview with Cronenberg, which you can read and/or listen to.

"Mr Cronenberg's deliberate, almost stately pacing - the way he lingers in scenes for an extra beat or two, as if studying the faces of his actors for clues - transforms what might have been a routine thriller into something genuinely troubling," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Eastern Promises, like [screenwriter Steve Knight's Dirty Pretty Things and Amazing Grace], is fundamentally about the moral scandal of slavery, the traffic in human bodies and human misery that persists, in secret and in the shadows, even in the modern, cosmopolitan West."

"[W]here once Cronenberg created veritably uncomfortable movie experiences ranging from exploitation horror (Shivers) to nightmarish sci-fi (Videodrome) to ludicrous perversion (Crash), he now seems entirely at home indulging viewer comfort," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "Since many of the encomiums doled out to Violence bordered on the delusional, it'll be interesting to read the contorted excuses given on behalf of Eastern Promises, an extension of Violence not in aim - it makes no attempt to expose a hypocritical social, cultural, or familial framework - but in tone, in its bathos that pretends the tragic dimensions of Serious Drama."

"For a director so frequently devoted to the transgressive, Eastern Promises offers a different kind of spectacle: Cronenberg on auto-pilot," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "His chilly style is firmly in place, along with the requisite moments of gore; unfortunately, what he's serving up is sub-par Oscar-bait."

"Cronenberg delivers his most lifeless movie to date, an unrepentant hack-job that can neither satisfy on a narrative level or disturb on a stylistic level," writes Bilge Ebiri for Nerve.

Cronenberg is "interested in the social uses of violence, whether as a tool of the powerful, a rite of initiation, or an erotic game," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "And even when - here as in A History of Violence - you're not quite sure what his meditations on the subject add up to, you leave his movies feeling unsettled in the best sense. Eastern Promises is only deceptively genre-bound; it's a conventional gangster film that morphs, Jeff Goldblum-style, into something far richer and stranger."

"[A]mong his countrymen, Cronenberg is an aberration as puzzling as any genetic mutation his films have described," notes Shane Danielson, blogging for the Guardian. "His sensibility is not refined. He is driven, sordid, faintly dangerous - the latter, not a term commonly associated with Canadian filmmaking, or indeed Canadian art in general. Yet unlike many of his peers, who have decamped to Hollywood to make careers as ersatz American film-makers (Ivan Reitman, James Cameron, Norman Jewison, Paul Haggis), he has remained mainly in his own country."

"Eastern Promises has a lot going for it, which makes it all the more disappointing when the story takes a fatal turn towards the end," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Not to give any spoilers, but it's the sort of audacious plot turn that some audiences will accept, while others won't; I'm in the latter category, and this script flaw made me start noticing other implausibilities like rapidly healing tattoos and well-behaved, heroin-addicted newborns."

"[W]hat's so fascinating about Cronenberg's progress is the way in which his films virtually always reveal something of his distinctive approach and ongoing preoccupations even when their milieus seem virtually antithetical to his established horror/sci-fi background," writes Josef Braun in Vue Weekly.

"The director's career has in some ways been a reprise of the greatest fears of the 1950s, so it makes sense that technophobia and fear of the unrecognizable self have given way to xenophobia and fear of the unrecognizable society," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"Cronenberg brings his usual cool intensity to the film, but not his usual gift for getting under the surface of things," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "For all the moments of visceral shock (which are many and memorable), the film remains unexpectedly bloodless."

"When one fluke is joined by a second, similar fluke, they're not flukes anymore," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "The joint gravitational pull of A History of Violence and the new Eastern Promises forces a change in what constitutes a 'characteristic' Cronenberg film."

"[I]t seems like Cronenberg has made the movie for one reason, and one reason only: Mortensen's body," suggests Anthony Kaufman.

"A new Godfather trilogy may be in the works," suggests Brad Brevet in the Stranger.

"Eastern Promises is audacious in its simplicity and pared-down qualities," writes Ray Pride. "There's so much more here than a stylized Russian mafia story and the fact of contemporary sex slavery."

"Eastern Promises is a pretty hollow viewing experience," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Too bad Cronenberg didn't get the Dirty Pretty Things script; that story about illegal trafficking in body parts might have been ideal for him." At any rate, Jennifer Merin talks with Cronenberg.

"After 2005's scathing A History of Violence, it didn't seem possible for the Canadian native to possibly be able to top himself, but with the bold, tight Eastern Promises, he actually does," writes Matt Mazur at PopMatters.

Updates, 9/15: "Knight throws in a twist that scrambles the movie’s moral compass so late in the game, so perfunctorily and so pointlessly, as to render any final reckoning incoherent," writes Mark Asch for Stop Smiling. "But, lest we savage a screenwriter to salvage an auteur, let us at least note that Cronenberg’s deployment of Howard Shore’s damp score... hits the same generic marks as their collaboration in A History of Violence, with none of the quotation marks; that under his direction, Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography... buys into Knight’s Two Londons schematic; and that, on Knight’s side of the ledger, the archetypal dynamic between Mortensen, [Armin] Mueller-Stahl, and [Vincent] Cassel is anchored by flavorsome dialogue, well-delivered in low Russian and accented English."

Eastern Promises "manages to be a surprisingly superficial gangster picture, ploddingly directed with a minimum of passion or visual invention," writes Michael Koresky for indieWIRE. "In fact, Eastern Promises, even when it snaps out of its narrative somnolence, seems almost mechanical in its deploying of its director's greatest hits: when does a trope just become a mannerism?"

Ryan Stewart brings up a point other reviewers have mentioned as well: "As for Naomi Watts, she has a more or less thankless role as the straight woman reacting to events around her and trying to protect the baby."

"It begins like a Cronenbergian horror movie, and becomes... a Cronenberg gangster movie - an elemental struggle between good and evil, life and death, east and west, blood and money, trust and betrayal, commerce and morality, mind and body," writes Jim Emerson. "Remember, that's 'elemental,' not 'simplistic.'"

Update, 9/16: "When you have a culture that's embedded in another, there's a constant tension between the two," Cronenberg tells Katrina Onstad, who notes in the New York Times: "While Eastern Promises was shooting last year in London, the Russian dissident spy Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned. In Hyde Park, about a half block from where Mr Cronenberg and much of his team were staying, traces of radioactive polonium were found in a building owned by the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, one of the accused in Mr Litvinenko's murder."

Posted by dwhudson at September 10, 2007 8:52 AM