– From his early days of state-funded terror-titles — including “From the Drain” and “Tourettes” — Canada’s David Cronenberg has given us what we fear. Or already possess. And made it a lot worse.
Imagine you and your sibling have a bit of a rivalry going on. It can’t be as bad as “Dead Ringers,” in which Jeremy Irons played psychotic twin gynecologists. General health problems? Try “The Fly.” Headache? You might feel better watching “Scanners,” in which a man’s head (latex, actually, filled with pet food and rabbit livers and shot from behind with a 12-gauge) explodes on-screen. No one’s as alienated as Ralph Fiennes in “Spider,” or carries quite the amount of baggage into a marriage as Viggo Mortensen’s reluctant hitman in “A History of Violence.”
So if you’re younger than 30 and worrying about how many tattoos are too many, Cronenberg may provide some weird solace via “Eastern Promises,” starring Mortensen as his much-illustrated Russian mobster. The second collaboration between actor and director, it’s the first major salvo of the Oscar season and is already a favorite with critics and audiences (it cracked the top 5 at the box office last weekend — its first of wide release).
In it, Cronenberg gets right down to business — the film opens with a throat-slashing and seldom stalls in its tense progress toward calamity, aswirl in a tale of Slavic gangsters, one angelic midwife (Naomi Watts) and the international sex trade. Through it all, Mortensen marches menacingly, as precisely inked as a Rand McNally road map, his presence as integral to the Cronenberg sensibility as the kimonos were in “M. Butterfly.”
Hard-core Cronenbergians probably imagine the director imbibing cocktails of formaldehyde and transmission fluid, but over a vanilla milkshake in a local cafe, the gray-maned Toronto auteur talked about Mortensen’s talent and work ethic, the latter of which, he said, reflected his own.
Tattoo research
“Viggo was very involved, not just as an actor trying to tailor his character, but in doing his research,” the director said. “He came up with a book called ‘Russian Criminal Tattoos,’ which was phenomenal. And there’s also a documentary called ‘The Mark of Cain,’ which was made by a friend of his, Alix Lambert. She, somehow, got into a maximum-security Russian prison in 2000 and interviewed prisoners who talked about the subculture of tattooing, which has existed since czarist days … a kind of secret society that’s developed mostly through prisons.
“The tattooing tells everything about you,” he continued. “It’s your passport, identity card — but more. It’s a medical report; it tells what crimes you’ve committed, what your sexual orientation is, where you served time, how long and where you might be in the hierarchy of criminals.
“And woe be you if you lie about it, because they’ll give you 20 minutes to get rid of the tattoo. And in prison, that pretty much means ripping off some skin. Or they’ll kill you. So it’s taken very seriously.”
Mortensen calls Cronenberg a “gentleman”; Cronenberg jokes that Mortensen is “cheap and available” but really considers him a brilliant actor who “ironically, is best known for a role he could have done in his sleep.” Namely, the much-Oscared “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, in which Mortensen played the heroic Aragon, and was, along with the other actors, neglected at awards time. The same might not be true of “Eastern Promises,” in which Mortensen dominates the screen the way a sport-utility vehicle dominates a parking space.
Similar sense of humor
“We’d gotten very close on ‘History of Violence’ because I love working with him; the way he works, his work ethic and his creative tone is very similar to my own,” Cronenberg said. “We share a similar sense of humor — sounds like a dating service doesn’t it? dateviggo.com — but I think he’s very underrated. I knew he was good, but when I started to direct him I knew he was great.”
For Cronenberg, there was no question about Mortensen’s suitability, from the fact that the actor looks Russian (he’s half-Danish) to what the director called his “musical ear.”
“He’s a composer, a musician, and he speaks seven languages,” Cronenberg said. “The Russian journalists who’ve seen it now say his accent is impeccable.”
As serious as Cronenberg is about cinematic detail — the accents, the locations, the blood-letting — he’s equally concerned about the moral implications of what gets on screen. “Each movie I do is on its own. A movie will talk to you, on every level. Not just the violence, but the sex, the action, even dialogue, how talky you should be.”
And why, exactly, Cronenberg does what he does.
“I’m an atheist and don’t believe in an afterlife; about my understanding of the human body and how it is the first fact of human existence. That if you kill someone, it is an act of absolute destruction. There is no heaven; I think you can rationalize killing someone if you think they’re going to an afterlife or are going to karmically recycle. I’m saying no, you’d better take it more seriously than that.”
He added: “That’s why in ‘Eastern Promises’ — and there are only three scenes of violence in it — I insist on the physical reality of this destruction. It’s hard to take, but I think you let the audience off the hook if they get to enjoy the action, but they don’t have to notice the blood. That’s my take on it — which sometimes gets mistaken for ‘Cronenberg is a gore hound.'”
