From the Ledge

So I celebrated the first night I wasn’t running an Asia/UK conference call in three weeks by taking advantage of the newly-discovered pleasures of Comcast on Demand and ordering up a movie I missed when it first came out last fall, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, which garnered a very well-deserved Academy Award Best Actor nomination for Viggo Mortensen.  I preferred the last Cronenberg-Mortensen collaboration, A History of Violence, because I think the writing in that movie was much more complex and asked intriguing questions about the decisions people make to stunt if not eliminate altogether an inherent propensity to violence.  Eastern Promises, although it contains some of the themes around violence and its drivers, as well as the complex good-guy/bad-guy duality many people possess, similar to the previous movie, is a much more straightforward film about the Russian mob in London.  Despite interesting glimpses into the practices and motivations of that community, the screenplay is not as richly detailed as I hoped it would be.  The acting though is superlative:  Naomi Watts, the great Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, Sinead Cusack (who I just saw and loved on Broadway in Stoppard’s Rock n’Roll), and Armin Mueller-Stahl give very detailed, memorable, multi-dimensional performances.  But I think the one person who matches Viggo’s intensity, daring, and you-can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him factor is the French actor Vincent Cassel, playing the closeted, drunken, emotionally volatile mobster, who starts off as Viggo’s boss and ends up his peer.  Cassel is always interesting to watch, and here he is riveting.  His near-breakdown at the end of the movie with the baby is great film acting, and I love the fact that he really pulls out all the stops in creating the homoerotic flavor of his character’s relationship with Viggo’s character, Nikolai (when he nuzzles Viggo with his head, he brings homoeroticism to a very different place! Like, get a motel room already!).  Viggo is stunning in a very subtle, very measured, but very multi-faceted performance.  He doesn’t have any huge dramatic scenes, but every time he is onscreen, you are just drawn to him.  He paints a very believable picture of a man in control, who leads many lives that no one person can totally see, full of interesting backstories and conflicting motivations.  And that much talked-about naked steam room fight scene- whoa, down boy! It is a technically accomplished scene and Viggo is probably the only actor in recent memory with the guts, and well, literally, the balls, to play that scene without any inhibitions and coy camera angles.  Viggo might not win Best Actor on February 24, but if it was up to me, and those BOATLOADs of gay men, straight women, and straight-identifying men straddling that pesky continuum, he should get an award for making late-night fantasy lives come true!  OK, Cronenberg, and the film critics and theorists can say all they want about that scene being a metaphor for this and that in the face of violence and death, yada, yada, yada, but people, it’s Aragon himself without a stitch on.  Forget metaphors!