Viggo Mortensen reunites with History of Violence director David Cronenberg for another story in which ordinary people get mixed up in the criminal underworld. Naomi Watts plays the London nurse whose attempts to find a home for a baby whose teen mother died in childbirth lead her to a restaurant that turns out to be a front for Russian mobsters. Mortensen’s character is merely the driver for the family of the boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), but he’s clearly smarter and more competent than the heir apparent (Vincent Cassel). We can see this as he calmly snips off the fingers of a recent murder victim so that the corpse can’t be easily identified. The nurse’s earnest attempts to do the right thing figure into the internecine conflicts.
Working from a script by Steven Knight (Amazing Grace, Dirty Pretty Things), Cronenberg uses the nurse as a audience proxy to draw us into a dangerous world. This isn’t a Russian Godfather, emphasizing brutality rather than myth in its Mafia tale, but it does bring in particulars of the Russian criminal culture, notably the elaborate role of tattoos in establishing heirarchy. The brutality doesn’t translate into frequent violence, but the violent scenes that do exist remove any sense that there is honor among thieves. I won’t describe the incredible fight scene in which the film climaxes except to say it’s original, utterly realistic, and extremely memorable.
There’s something detached about Cronenberg’s cinematic approach, yet this only emphasizes the ugliness of what’s being depicted and draws us into the story, which offers a couple of shocks of its own.
IMDB link
reviewed 10/21/07
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