I saw
"Eastern Promises" in NYC with Meryl last week, and posted the following in my LJ. Meryl suggested I post it here too - and well, here I am and here it is.

Don't think there are very specific spoilers in this, but hints at what's going on, yes - surely.
(I should perhaps also mention first that I am and remain a serious Lord of the Rings fan and I'm also very impressed with "History of Violence". Viggo was the big draw for me in wanting to see EP.)
I hate movie violence, but in Eastern Promises the sinister tension level always let you knew what was coming so it was possible to avert your gaze if you needed to. And while the physical violence *was* extremely graphic, it wasn't gratuitous, drawn-out, lingering, sadistic nor motivated by the pleasure of describing the giving of pain and suffering for its own sake. Any such instances *would* have made it a no-no for me. The violence also was very contained. That is, the graphically violent scenes were actually few and far between. (I had my hands firmly over my eyes each time.

) That is, except for the already justly-famous nude bathhouse fight. One review I just read on Rottentomatos described how the lady next to the reviewer kept alternating between covering her eyes and looking up despite herself to check out Viggo's "kibbles and bits". I suppose that pretty much describe my viewing of it too.

He's a courageous guy, doing that scene - because he has to know it'll be screencapped to exhaustion by every fanperson in sight. And the number of those *must* now be increasing.
Apart from that, it was an incredibly *acted* scene. You believed every second of it - so intense, real, life-or-death desperate - not seeming choreographed at all. Viggo did an incredible acting job all throughout this film - like a cobra, so poised and still most times. Oozing danger and self-assurance and self-confidence but with a completely controlled and contained body language, and then suddenly exploding into impressive movement and deliberate action. And those tattoos he was covered in! I've always seen the tattoos that people like David Beckham and Angelina Jolie and Heath Ledger cover themselves with as so much unpleasant visual noise, but on Viggo it actually looked great and adding to the personality. (Helps to know he washed it all off at the end, though.)
And the film keeps me thinking about it. All the actors were *very* good. (Though I'll be interested in reading opinions on Naomi Watt's spoken english.) The film's colour language was fitting and very noticable - dark and murky, bleak, approximating black-and-white film language, almost... but with splashes of intensely bright colour (many times red, though not always blood) ever so often.
The story was gripping, very tense, a believable and frightening world of unscrupulous mafia - grabbing hold and keeping me on the edge all the while. Its focus on the dreadful plight of poor Eastern girls who get lured west and end up in a miserable hopeless life of forced prostitution was told with a lot of compassion and a hint of sentimentality too. The more films that show this for what it is, - inhuman cruel slavery - the better it is.
And it seems being "queer" is no more an option in today's "macho" Russian mafia than in 1963 Wyoming, and that the denial takes just the same toll on a person's psyche..... Not that the character in question managed to elicit much sympathy from me in any case. Nevertheless - a multilayered portrayal, all the more interesting.
There was a twist at the end I totally didn't see coming, in addition to several twists that I did see might be coming. Some elements of the story's plot I found completely unrealistic (relating to the mother and the newborn child and what happened to them) - but only in hindsight, and even those events I keep thinking about, whether there might not be a reasonable explanation for them after all, just that the film didn't use up precious time spelling those explanations out.
The short of this? I think I'm turning into a serious Viggo fangirl. And "Eastern Promises" despite its violence level was fascinating, interesting, haunting and very, very good. I'll watch it again soon as it premieres in my neck of the woods.
