The key to every David Cronenberg movie is, of course, the body; specifically, it's limitations, mutations and mutilations. So it should be no surprise that the bravura sequence in his sharp new thriller,
Eastern Promises, is the one where Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a Russian gangster with a hint of a conscience and brand new gangland tattoos, is ambushed naked in a London bath house by two fully dressed thugs with short curved knives.
There's something James Bond about the scene, Connery or maybe Craig Bond. Perhaps I'm just influenced by being in the middle of Fleming's most celebrated episode,
From Russia with Love, back when Bond had an animal side as well, often described naked or in boxers when alone at home or in a hotel room. In what may have been an intentional way, Cronenberg's fight scene plays like a mirror image of the one in that book and movie, when Russian agent Red Grant (Robert Shaw) finally attacks Bond (Connery) in the claustrophobic train compartment, on the elegant Orient Express. The Russian had a suicide blond buzzcut. Bond was jet black, neat with just a touch of rake.
In the bath fight, Mortensen's doo is jet black and cut like Connery's
That wall-banging, to the death hand-to-hand Orient Express fight scene set the standard. Until now.
As always, in the fight and in the opening sequence, Cronenberg takes the gore that touch over-the-top, to look-don't-look and look again. He punishes the audience because he knows it's what they want/don't want. But most of all, it's a signature, a throwback to his 1970's experimental horror days of
The Brood and
They Came from Within where the body mutations were, shall we say, visionary, and he needed them to stand out.
Who can forget the "New Flesh" of
Videodrome
, the psychotic twin gynecologists of
Dead Ringers, or Jeff Goldblum literally falling apart in
The Fly. Heads exploding in
Scanners. Judy Davis mainlining into her breast near the start of
Naked Lunch.
The new flesh, indeed.
What's happened over his last two pictures is an extraordinary late career turn where he's become the most exciting director of movies for adults of his generation, that kind of lost generation after the Movie Brats (Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas) that also includes David Lynch, but with a much more steady output. Thanks to working mainly outside of Hollywood in his home city of Toronto, and now twice in London, he's put out nearly a picture a year.
These last two have been from screenwriters other than Cronenberg himself, a reversal for him, and one that seems to have opened his wings. They're linear and accessible, fairly new for David, but the payoff for all his years laboring in his own post-structural macabre has yielded the best director of pure suspense tension maybe alive today.
From the opening credits with Howard Shore's foreboding, Continental score, and right into the first scene, in a barber shop, it's Hitchcock all the way, absolutely tense grand master work, in total control except for when he lets the out-of-control slip in, as Hitchcock yearned for but only glanced at, as in
Psycho and
Frenzy.
The basic story, of midwife Naomi Watts discovering the diary of a fourteen year old girl who dies in childbirth and how it mixes her up with the 100% ruthless Russian mob, is simple and nerve-wracking. But as with the diner and climax scenes in
A History of Violence, screen idol Viggo Mortensen is the perfect vessel for Cronenberg to allow the kind of cathartic fight scene deliverance he previously eschewed. We're the richer for it.
Now always attracting impossibly great casts, including Armin Mueller-Stahl and Vincent Cassel as father/son mobsters, and the aging Polish-born director Jerzy Skolimowski, Cronenberg gets spot-on performances, all in a nifty 100 minutes, tight.
With their previous movie, Cronenberg and Mortensen explored the body as a vessel for identity. As Tom/Joey, Viggo slid effortlessly and convincingly between two men, one we started the movie with, the other who barges back in from long before the movie began. Here he slides effortlessly into his Siberian accent, having done the trips to Russia and individual research. There's a question of identity here as well, although maybe on an even more spiritual, brooding level. But even the naked fight harkens back to the previous movie, echoing the bumpy, crazily erotic staircase sex scene, and Viggo has even called it "Maria Bello's revenge." This time with overtones both homoerotic and classic male figure.
The spirit may divide but the body is static, the backstop, the stumbling block.
It's the pre-story miscarriage that makes Watts' Anna so protective of the orphaned infant. The first time we see the baby it must be a prosthetic newborn, a Lynch-like practical, but somehow all the more spellbinding for it. The real child is allowed to stare out at us, breaking the fourth wall, then drawing us back in again.
It's the order given by Cassel's Kirill to see actual intercourse, explicit voyeurism, and all of us implicated.
It's the blood of identity, the proof that just as easily pools on the hard tile floor.
But most of all it's the prison and gangland tattoos on Viggo's body, raw semiotic signifiers of pain and of membership. Viggo's age, pushing 50, is his ally, the thinking man's action hero of his generation. He's the king, after all, the title monarch of J.R.R. Tolkien's/Peter Jackson's
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and there's no doubt that Cronenberg knows it. In his standout line, Nikolai explains, "I can't become king if someone else already sits on the throne."
Just as Aragorn battled Mordor and Tom returned to Philadelphia, there's something that Nikolai can only take by wit, blood and strategy.
If Martin Scorsese has Robert DeNiro (and now Leonardo DiCaprio), in Viggo Mortensen, David Cronenberg has finally found his heroic onscreen alter ego.
And not a moment too soon.
