Eastern Promises

After a teenage girl is brought to the hospital and dies giving birth to a child, the hospital midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) taking into her possession the girl's diary attempts to track down some family for the new child. She gets her uncle (I've heard several make reference to it being her father, but it is not) to start translating the diary from Russian and follows a lead of a business card to a local restaurant. The restaurant is owned by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) who also happens to be a fairly powerful and ruthless Russian mob boss. As Naomi begins to understand what is going on she realizes she is in a very dangerous situation. She has also caught the eye for inexplicable reasons of Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a driver for Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). The film plays out as Nikolai aids Anna in small ways as she looks to uncover what happened to the girl who died.

Beyond anything else it seems this film is about Nikolai played brilliantly by Mortensen. He is understated and a layer of mystery surrounds him. How did he end up as a driver/body guard for Kirill? Why does he take so much interest in Anna? It is stated that a Russian mobster's story is written in tatoos, so what story do Nikolai's tatoos tell? We get some answers to these questions but not all the answers and maybe not even satisfactory answer and I love that aspect of this film. Yes he has a past but does any of that bear relevance on the moment at hand? Not really and so it isn't discussed.

The second amazing thing about the film is a fight sequence late in the film. Graphic and brutal and desperate and all done with Nikolai in the nude. And the point in all the graphicness and brutality is that it is shot in a specific way. It is not choreographed to hide bits of the male anatomy, in fact Nikolai is quite naked and at his most vulnerable and its all visible on screen.

And yet in the end I'm not sure how I feel about this film. Because there is a plot twist late in the film that I didn't much care for. It just made Nikolai slightly less interesting in my eyes and for me this film was made or broke on how interesting he is. Watts is so uninteresting in this film. Vincent Cassel is a bit over the top and Mueller-Stahl seems to be trying to evoke a monster under the guise of a charming restaurant owner but he just always comes off as vaguely creepy to me in every scene.

So in the end I like Viggo and what he does with this role. Some of the story telling elements aren't that interesting but in the end that doesn't detract to much from what works and so its worth seeing for that.