Eastern Promises. Jodie Foster in the Brave One.__________
'Okay, now I'm going to do his teeth and cut off his fingers,' Nikolai Luzhin ( Viggo Mortensen ) tells a fellow Russian mob compatriot early in Eastern Promises. Then the elegant Mortensen stubs out his cigarette on his tongue and goes to work on the corpse lying in front of him. The elegant, soft-spoken, supremely lethal Nikolai eclipses the character Mortensen played in A History of Violence, his first collaboration with director David Cronenberg. Critics went nutty over that beautiful character study, which focused on the contradictions of a pacifist whose violent past comes back to claim him. The director, working with a terrific script by Steve Knight, gives Mortensen a character that mines the same contrasts in this new movie. But with the addition of the Russian mob brotherhood, a fascinating variation on the Corleones and the Sopranos, Cronenberg scales new audacious heights and Eastern Promises is bloody, enthralling and marvelously entertaining.
A teenage Russian girl dies while giving birth in the emergency room. The attending midwife, Anna ( Naomi Watts ) , discovers a diary written in Russian among the girl's personal effects—and a business card for a stylish Trans-Siberian restaurant. Anna visits the restaurant on Christmas Eve to see if she can find a translator for the diary. The restaurant's cultured owner, Semyon ( a magnificent Armin Mueller-Stahl ) , agrees to translate but asks that she bring the original instead of a copy; Anna agrees. On her way in and out of the restaurant she encounters Mortensen as Nikolai, Semyon's driver and 'fixer,' as well as Seymour Cassel as Kirill, Semyon's son.
It quickly becomes apparent that the dead girl was part of a sex-trade operation run by crime boss Semyon and his deadly family. The relationship between Semyon, Kirill and Nikolai mirrors the ones between Paul Newman, Daniel Craig and Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition. The son in each is a weakling and a violent, drunken screw-up, forever displeasing the elegant yet brutal father who much prefers the sleek efficiency and unquestioned loyalty of his number-two operative, who he considers to be the real son in all but name.
Cronenberg adds a wonderful undercurrent to this dysfunctional trio by making Kirill a closeted gay and Nikolai the unrequited object of his lust. Nikolai uses Kirill's unspoken attraction to him to help advance in the ranks ( most vividly as the picture draws to its conclusion ) . Mortensen, quietly commanding like DeNiro in The Godfather Part II, draws on his innate confidence, grace and charisma. With his Elvis hairdo, black Ray Bans and black Armani garb, as well as an air of violence just under his surface, Mortensen is mesmerizing.
The picture itself is deeply alluring as it contrasts between seduction and Cronenberg's famous penchant for violence. The two strains coalesce in the movie's climax, in which a naked Mortensen ( yes, all of him ) is set upon by two knife-wielding assassins. This sequence, with its commingled ultra violence and undercurrent of sexual turn-on, is right up there with the best of DePalma in Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out.
Cronenberg focuses on the fate of the baby and that of Anna and Nikolai as the picture moves toward its conclusion, but it's Nikolai's position in the 'family' and the brutal brotherhood itself that's the most interesting. With material this rich, one wants to explore the inherent juiciness other characters promise and Cronenberg is canny enough to add a twist that makes Nikolai and his potential impact on the others all the more enticing. Not surprisingly, the movie begs for a sequel—here's your own Godfather saga Mr. Cronenberg, your next Sopranos HBO. But make sure to keep in the gay undercurrent and pony up the bucks to keep Mortensen in the role. Eastern Promises is so promising with possibilities one would hate to just stop at one.
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Jodie Foster returns to the heat and garbage of the Manhattan inner city of Scorcese's Taxi Driver in her new movie, The Brave One. With assurance and daring, this toughest of female actors plunges into the sights and sounds of her most infamous movie and takes on the mantle of DeNiro's Travis Bickle character without batting an eye. 'John Hinckley, Jr. ,who?' the actor seems to say, 'Out of my way.' Foster plays a woman who goes from victim to vigilante after the police can't seem to find the group of thugs that attacked and murdered her husband in Central Park. Terrence Howard plays a sympathetic police detective who suspects Foster is the vigilante; Naveen Andrews, from TV's Lost, plays the victim and Foster's love interest.
The movie and the role are variations on many that Foster has essayed before—Flightplan, Panic Room, The Accused, etc.—but, placing herself in the locations and situations, this steely part brings to mind dual images of Foster as the 14-year-old prostitute in Taxi Driver and the attendant tragedy that engulfed the young actor when Hinckley identified too strongly with the movie and Foster's character and attempted to kill the president. Foster hasn't discussed that historical incident in depth ( or confirmed or denied speculation about her sexuality ) but the knowledge of all this stuff fuses together when you're watching the movie. The Brave One, an average to pretty good psychological action thriller carried by Foster's unflinching star turn, is elevated by that knowledge.
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