Greetings from the Toronto Film Festival, where I’ve seen more interesting movies in the last 24 hours than I often see in the course of a month in Chicago. NEW PARAGRAPH.
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Two of the most buzzed-about features so far are Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg’s follow-up to A History of Violence, and Juno, Jason Reitman’s follow-up to Thank You for Smoking. I saw the Cronenberg movie this morning at 8:45 AM, but I was wide awake by 8:46, when a Russian gangster relaxing in a barber chair had his neck laboriously carved open with a straight razor. The movie is almost as gory as its predecessor, but whereas A History of Violence was widely viewed as “implicating the audience” in the violence, Eastern Promises doesn’t supply even that level of handy, self-reflexive justification. It reminded me less of a Haneke-style meta-movie than the sort of conflicted-bad-guy dramas that established the Bogart and Cagney mythologies, with Viggo Mortensen stealing the movie as the mordantly funny driver for a ruthless crime boss in London (Armin Mueller-Stahl). He’s the guy who does the dirty work, pulling the aforementioned victim’s teeth and cutting off his fingers so the body can’t be identified, yet he seems within reach of redemption after he crosses paths with a motorcycle-riding midwife from a local hospital (Naomi Watts). NEW PARAGRAPH
