Under the soil of russia

[September 19th, 2007] On its surface, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises tells a familiar story. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A newborn baby is menaced by ruthless gangsters until a gruff hero arises to the child’s defense. Audiences could be forgiven for yawning, then searching around the theater for Clive Owen. But Eastern Promises isn’t just a movie with haunting themes playing under its surface: It’s a movie explicitly concerned with how surfaces warp the things they cover up.

Consider this diary entry from the threatened baby’s mother, who dies in a pool of her own blood in a pharmacy aisle as the movie opens. The passage is discovered by a London nurse (Naomi Watts) and recited in voice-over on two separate occasions; the words are the last we hear before the screen goes black. The entry reads: “When I was six my father died. He worked in the mines, so when he died he was already buried. We are all buried there, under the soil of Russia.”

Not a single word in this text has been chosen at random; together, they express everything Cronenberg and screenwriter Steve Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) want to say with this ornate, fascinating movie. There’s the repetition of the word “buried,” with its evocation of concealment and rot, and then there’s the word “soil”—which could have been “dirt” or “ground,” except those terms don’t carry the secondary meaning of contamination and shame.

Am I obsessing over minutiae here? I don’t think so, not when Cronenberg has so carefully constructed a story about a motherland poisoning its children—a repeated theme in Russian history, from Ivan’s cannibalism to Stalin’s 20 million. Eastern Promises treats this bleak legacy as something imprinted on the very skin of its inheritors—the vory v zakone mobsters wear their criminal commitments as intricate tattoos. A little ink means a lot.

Such details are in keeping with Cronenberg’s long-held fascination with mutation and mutilation. This time around, instead of turning Jeff Goldblum into an insect à la The Fly, he buries Viggo Mortensen’s body in black-and-blue tats. Mortensen last worked with Cronenberg in A History of Violence—less a movie than a nasty parlor trick—and here he’s dolled up to look like a young Paulie Walnuts sucking on a lemon. But this role, as a mob cleanup man, is more textured than anything he’s done before. It’s certainly more revealing: He wages a climactic battle in a Turkish bath, his naked body as powerful and unprotected as any wounded animal.

With the exception of this fatal schvitz, Eastern Promises is not an extraordinarily violent movie. If it seems graphic, that’s because Cronenberg realizes that owning a body is a severe and dangerous thing, and he treats every offense against the flesh as a serious matter. Even the collection of a DNA sample is precisely meditated: “For poetic reasons,” a character snarls, “I suggest you take his blood.” David Cronenberg is aware of everything that spills or taints the blood—of an individual or a nation—and his reasons are always poetic.