Man is Wolf to Man

Eastern Promises Reviewed

by Brian Bork, Senior MDiv.

The House of Meetings, Martin Amis' recent novel, is a glimpse into the conflicted lives of two brothers who spent a portion of their youth in Soviet labor camps. The experience of these camps - brief though it may be when compared to the span of an entire life – lingers, and defines the remaining days of the novel's two main characters. The reader quickly learns that it's futile to think that anyone “gets over” the gulag. Instead, lives are immeasurably wrenched, distorted, and refashioned by it. The malnutrition, the toil, and the frostbite ensure its victims emerge as wraiths. But the real damage – the permanent affliction - is left for the soul, for human nature. The hunger, terror, and “violent boredom” of the camps instill, or at least augment, human savagery; they are places, says the novel's narrator, where “man is wolf to man.”

These sorts of wolves abound in David Cronenberg's latest film, Eastern Promises. The story centers around the activity of the Vory V Zakone (Thieves in Law), an organized crime syndicate born in the grindhouse of Stalin's labor camps. These are expatriate gangsters; they've set up shop in London as human traffickers, promoters of a sex trade between London and former Eastern Bloc countries. This insidious business is conducted out of the back of “The Trans-Siberian Restaurant,” owned by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the godfather of the outfit, and his lunatic son Kirill (Vincent Cassil). Escorting this pack of wolves through the London night is Nikolai, an icy threat of a man played by Viggo Mortensen. Ostensibly little more than a laconic limousine driver, at least as far as mob hierarchy goes, Nikolai is far more chilling than his superiors, and he's more than willing to take care of some especially morbid business.

This underworld comes into contact with the “regular” world when Anna (Naomi Watts), a hospital midwife, delivers the baby of a hemorrhaging Georgian girl named Tatiana. The baby lives, but the mother doesn't make it; she leaves behind on the hospital gurney a small diary which Anna snatches up. The diary is all in Russian, so Anna brings it home to her uncle, a “wodka”-soaked old Russian coot. Uncle Stepan has something of a moment of clarity upon paging through the journal – he's not going to translate it for Anna, under no uncertain terms. Deciding to outsource the translation, Anna tracks down “The Trans-Siberian Restaurant” from a business card left in the journal, and meets up with Semyon, who puts on his kindest grandfatherly countenance for her. Anna's demeanor is not exactly one of trepidation, but of caution and intense bravery – it's as if she doesn't trust Semyon right from the start, but her desire to protect the newborn causes her to willfully walk into the wolf's lair. It's concern that is well placed, though, as she realizes in horrifying detail when she returns home to find out that Uncle Stepan has had a change of heart and translated the journal. The journal is at once a plea and an indictment: we learn that Tatiana was an unwitting prostitute from Semyon's fold, a recipient of powerful narcotic injections, and that her child is genetic proof of the wanton criminality of the highest ranking members of Semyon's outfit.

It's not long, of course, before the Vory learn about the words in the diary, and come around looking for Anna. The chase is on, through the rain-slicked nighttime of a London that Cronenberg has painted with sickly green and jaundiced hues. It's one of bone-bending tension, which is to be expected of Cronenberg, whose early career was spent suturing together horror flicks. Though his skill as a director places him many orders of magnitude beyond that genre, many of its tropes remain, right down to the way in which the ignition in Anna's motorcycle fails with perfect and horrible timing, allowing Mortensen's Nikolai to sidle up to her with glacial menace. Despite such menace, Nikolai is strangely softened when he interacts with Anna, and the viewer hopes that his violent and chilly exterior is a facade.

The not quite-tenderness of the relationship between Anna and Nikolai is really a brief respite in a film that has some pretty spectacular brutality. It'd be easy to identify this tendency as arising from Cronenberg's past as an auteur of horror movies, for which a lurid fascination with sliced and diced body parts is part of the job description. That would be too easy of an assessment, too dismissive of what Cronenberg is trying to do here, though. His prior film, A History of Violence (also starring Mortensen), was an exploration of the vagaries of violence in American culture: in its history, in its myths, and in its entertainment. Eastern Promises is no different in its aims, it has just broadened the scope of its examination; it goes past London, through Russia, and toward human nature in general. On a very visceral level, the violence in Eastern Promises is an indictment of our taste in films: the brutal summer blockbusters with their violent saturnalia. The logic of 300 or Die Hard or V for Vendetta is that there is redemption to be found in lethal violence, especially if that violence is in collusion with a surplus of wisecracking machismo. But Hollywood knows that we're not always interested in redemption, and we just want a little sex and violence, so they combine the two: firearms look much more appealing when they're holstered to the lithe haunch of Angelina Jolie. The violence of Eastern Promises functions in a completely opposite way – its aesthetic is not one of seduction or pyrotechnic action-film savvy – it is swift, graphic and brutal. It is cinematic barbarity that exposes just how awful violence is; it's not something to hoot and holler at over a tub of popcorn, but something from which we recoil.

Man's wolfish traits are certainly under scrutiny amid this violence, but Cronenberg isn't just interested in showing us how man is wolf to man. Man is also wolf to woman, as is obvious from the subject matter here, and the perils of masculinity get their due exposure. The female characters in Eastern Promises aren't developed like their male counterparts are, and they inhabit what could be considered to be stereotypical roles: the noble prostitute, the maternal nurse, the concerned mother. They all have angelic characteristics, too, visible in the innocence of Semyon's granddaughters, the soft and lovely singing of a Ukrainian girl, and in the way Anna's golden locks cascade out of her black motorcycle helmet. It could be argued that the thinness of the female characters here is a result of some quasi-sexist oversight on Cronenberg's part, or that Watts' performance is simply overshadowed by Mortensen's (the latter is certainly true; the former, not so much). These “woman on a pedestal” characterizations aren't the result of some subtle sexism in the film; instead, they're in place to help illustrate just how male the problem of physical violence is. Semyon and Kirill dwell excessively on their macho heterosexuality, and Nikolai's late father's masculinity is called into question, simply for not participating in the gangland lifestyle.

Physical violence may be a mostly male problem, but that's not to say that men are inherently violent creatures. Instead, this is violence that has been amplified and extended far beyond what we expect of normally functioning men, and it's because of the horrors that lie in their past that they behave this way. In a soliloquy regarding the death of his family before a group of high-ranking Vory, Nikolai describes how his existence is one that is in a perpetual “dead zone.” The death of his family came in the labor camps, under the soil of Russia (to repeat one of the film's refrains), where Nikolai did his own share of hard time. It was in this morbid servitude that his human nature devolved and was stripped down to reptilian brass tacks (or, as in the penultimate scene, down to bare flesh and gangster tattoos). Even in scenes where his full humanity is in better focus there is a pallor, a brooding darkness that can't be dispelled.

This is where the film's chief theme comes to the fore: when we are in slavery, our joy, civility and compassion become moribund, and we turn into spiritual and emotional ciphers, creatures stripped of what it is that makes us who we are. This film, though perhaps not overtly humanistic, is one that is deeply concerned with this affliction on the human condition. It demands an answer to the question: what happens to people when they are enslaved to each other, when they are offered up as oblations to ideology, to politics, to grinding poverty or war? It is a question that moves deeply into the darker regions of human nature, which makes it difficult to ponder, even for people who know something about light prevailing in the darkness. But it's one that we need to reckon with, sent out, as we are, as “sheep among the wolves.”

Want to respond to this article? Send your letter to letters@kerux.org; see the guidelines for more information.