Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 2007

The Contenders:

Viggo Mortensen: Eastern Promises
Tommy Lee Jones: In the Valley of Elah
George Clooney: Michael Clayton
Johnny Depp: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Daniel Day-Lewis: There Will Be Blood (winner)

Eastern Promises

Film: Eastern Promises
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I’d seen Eastern Promises before, and I wasn’t looking forward to seeing it again. That’s not because it’s a bad movie; on the contrary, it’s a great film. It’s one of the best films of David Cronenberg’s career. No, the problem here is that it’s brutal and completely realistic. There are certain things that can happen in a film that bother me terribly. I can see blood and guts without any problem, but seeing someone get his or her throat cut really bothers me. Cronenberg, with his love of body horror, doesn’t just have people get their throats cut; he makes us really look at it. This is to say nothing of the brutal fight in the bathhouse. This is the definition of a hard watch.

Eastern Promises is almost a film noir, albeit an astonishingly brutal one. It starts simply and quickly devolves into something horrible but fascinating. A young girl is taken to the hospital because she is bleeding. It turns out she is both underage and pregnant and about to give birth. Complications in the birth kill her, but the baby survives, a Jane Doe at birth. All of this is watched by Anna (Naomi Watts), a midwife who works at the hospital. She finds a diary written in Russian on the girl’s body and takes it to her uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski) to have it translated. He balks after reading a few pages, since those few pages are filled with accounts of drugs, prostitution, and rape.