Chad Betz reviews Eastern Promises

And now...Chad Betz:

"I think David Cronenberg has always had trouble with depicting fully two-sided relationships. The Fly, Spider, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, etc. have prominent relationships that mostly just function as something for the protagonists to react to as they continue their disintegration. This is put into a hilarious light by Rabid with whiny boy chasing porn star girlfriend across the country. The dynamic between Law and Leigh in eXistenZ is semi-interesting, but mostly besides the point anyways since that film's excellence has everything to do with its conceptual and formal rigor.

And it didn't matter because that was all that those films needed. They were focused on their singular central characters. Dead Ringers is so awesome because it's a sort of non-exception, it's Cronenberg and Irons exploring one character from two sides and using that split for the conflict and reactive purposes served by Geena Davis in The Fly or Miranda Richardson in Spider. But instead of cheapening the internal conflict by externalizing it in some BS abstractive move, Cronenberg and Irons still treat both brothers as whole entities and people, and so the internal conflict just gets doubled and plays contrapuntally. And it's freaking great.

*SPOILERS*

With Eastern Promises, you have Viggo Mortensen's Russian mafia driver/undertaker/rank-climber who's pretty interesting, and then you have Naomi Watts' investigative midwife, who isn't. She's just underwritten, the background information of a miscarriage isn't used enough in her character throughout the middle of the film, the time spent with her mother and uncle is mostly a waste -- the Viggo-Vincent Cassell comrades/lovers (Cassell plays the homosexual son of the mob boss played by Armin Muehler-Stahl) dynamic's about a hundred times more involving. This would be okay if Naomi's connection to Viggo interacted with him in compelling ways; it would even be okay besides that if the film's conclusion didn't depend on there being a balanced give-and-take between the two. But.

I mean, I get it, at the end Naomi's complete because she gets the baby. Viggo's incomplete, he's still in "the Zone," the deadness he says he's felt since he was young. He got a glimpse of completion and life with Naomi, he kisses it goodbye at the end. Or did he? Oh my, the ambiguity. I just find it disappointing because the conclusion has little emotional resonance when it could have had so much, when it could have been a regular Dead Ringers if Naomi's character had just been better developed and better integrated with Viggo's storyline, and if we could have really seen how Naomi might have represented Viggo's last hope. And the twist with the police muddies the issue even further. It feels like a botched storyline because it's a half-assed one that can't hold up to the otherwise striking implications of its finish.

But I'll still take it over A History of Violence, which, for my money, had zero interesting characters and a completely listless closing scene. Plus no crazy bath-house fight."