Eastern Promises

David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” opens with a throat-slashing and a young woman collapsing in blood in a drugstore, and connects these events with a descent into an underground of Russians who have immigrated to London and brought their crime family with them. Like the Corleone family but with a less wise and more fearsome patriarch, the Vory V Zakone family of the Russian mafia operates in the shadows of legitimate business — in this case, a popular restaurant.



The slashing need not immediately concern us. The teenage girl who hemorrhages is raced to a hospital and dies in childbirth in the arms of a midwife named Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts). Fiercely determined to protect the helpless surviving infant, she uses her Russian-born family (Sinead Cusack and Jerzy Skolimowski) to translate the dead girl’s diary, and it leads her to a restaurant run by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the head of the Mafia family. Her father begs her to go nowhere near that world.

Semyon has a vile son named Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and a violent but loyal driver and bodyguard, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). And the gears of the story shift into place when the diary, the midwife and the crime family become interlocked.



“Eastern Promises” is no ordinary crime thriller, just as Cronenberg is no ordinary director. Beginning with low-rent horror films in the 1970s because he could get them financed, Cronenberg has moved film by film into the top rank of directors, and here he wisely reunites with Mortensen, star of their “A History of Violence” (2005). No, Mortensen is not Russian, but don’t even think about the problem of an accent; he digs so deeply into the role you may not recognize him at first. Rated R for strong, brutal and bloody violence, some graphic sexuality, language and nudity. HHHH – Roger Ebert



In the Valley of Elah

Paul Haggis’ “In the Valley of Elah” is built on Tommy Lee Jones’ persona, and that is why it works so well. The same material could have been banal or routine with an actor trying to be “earnest” and “sincere.” Jones isn’t trying to be anything at all. His character is simply compelled to do what he does, and has a lot of experience doing it. He plays a Vietnam veteran named Hank Deerfield, now hauling gravel in Tennessee. He gets a call from the Army that his son Mike, just returned from a tour in Iraq, is AWOL from his squad at Fort Rudd. That sounds wrong. He tells his wife, Joan (Susan Sarandon), that he’s going to drive down there and take a look into things. “It’s a two-day drive,” she says. He says, “Not the way I’ll drive it.”



He checks into a cheap motel. His investigations in the area of Fort Rudd take him into topless bars, chicken shacks, the local police station, the base military police operation and a morgue where he’s shown something cut into pieces and burned, and he IDs the remains as his son. Looking through his son’s effects, he asks as a distraction if he can have his Bible while he’s pocketing his son’s cell phone. It’s been nearly destroyed by heat, but a friendly technician salvages some video from it, filled with junk artifacts but still retaining glimpses of what it recorded on video: glimpses of hell.



To describe the many avenues of his investigation would be pointless and diminish the film’s gathering tension. I’d rather talk about what Haggis, also the writer and co-producer, does with the performance. Imagine the first violinist playing a note to lead the orchestra into tune. Haggis, as director, draws that note from Jones, and the other actors tune to it. They include Charlize Theron as a city homicide detective, Jason Patric as a military policeman, Sarandon as Deerfield’s wife, and various other police and military officers and members of Mike’s unit in Iraq.



None of these characters are heightened. None of them behave in any way as if they’re in a thriller. Other directors might have pumped them up, made them colorful or distinctive in some distracting way. Theron could (easily) be sexy. Patric could (easily) be a bureaucratic paper-pusher. Sarandon could (easily) be a hysterical worrier or an alcoholic, or push it any way you want to.



Paul Haggis is making good films these days. He directed “Crash” and wrote “Million Dollar Baby,” both Oscar winners, and was nominated as co-writer of “Letters From Iwo Jima.” He and his casting directors assembled an ideal ensemble for this film, which doesn’t sensationalize but just digs and digs into our apprehensions. I have been trying to think who else could have carried this picture except Tommy Lee Jones, and I just can’t do it. Who else could tell Theron’s young son the story of David and Goliath (which took place in the Valley of Elah) and make it sound like instruction in the tactics of being brave? Rated R for violent and disturbing content, language and some sexuality/nudity. HHHH – RE