When we last saw Irish born
writer-director Terry George of the African genocide drama Hotel Rwanda, he tried his hand at mobster comedy with the Brendan
Fraser starring Whole Lotta Sale. After a clandestine release and meager
critical reception, George returns to the genocide drama some twelve years
later with the Armenian set historical drama The Promise. Not to be
confused with Chen Kaige’s utterly ridiculous 2005 film of the same name, the expensive
yet independently financed drama depicting the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman
Empire lasting from 1915 to 1922 aims to be a hard and heavy historical epic
ala David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago.
Films depicting the Armenian
genocide have always faced an uphill battle and that’s no exception here, with
controversy cropping up regarding a holocaust denial effort to downvote the
film on IMDb with over 4,000 fraudulent ratings. Further still, the pricy indie reportedly
underwent reshoots and after a September premiere last year was pushed back all
the way to April 2017. Despite the solid
leading performance by Oscar Isaac and sound production values taking on a
still sore subject that’s still denied it ever even took place by the Turkish
government, The Promise while
undeniably a deliberate tearjerker falls victim to the oldest historical drama cliché
in the book: the love triangle.
Depicting scenic beauty amid
carnage and horror, Oscar Isaac plays Armenian medical student Mikael who
becomes embroiled in a romantic triangle between an Armenian woman named Ana
(Charlotte Le Bon) and her American journalist boyfriend Chris (Christian
Bale). Whereas Hotel Rwanda boiled down to a central protagonist, The Promise allows for Oscar Isaac to
create a fully-fledged character fighting for survival in one of the actor’s
more physically daunting performances whereas Bale and Le Bon get left to the
wayside. Loosely adapted from Franz
Werfel’s novel The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh about an Armenian rebelling against the Turkish government, it’s a
story that needed to be told if only the tried and tired triangular romance
trope didn’t keep getting in the way.
I’m genuinely torn about
this one. It’s a topic worthy of a
documentary or even an austere historical epic rather than a melodramatic hook
we’ve seen done to death. There are
scenes of mass murder and death that are undeniably moving if not completely
horrifying, pushing the film’s PG-13 rating as far as it can go, and then the
digital camera with that smeary Michael Mann frame rate pans back to a jealous
and ineffectual Bale looking on from a distance at the kisses shared by Isaac
and Le Bon’s secret romance. The film is
potent enough with the thunderstorm of human slaughter and frankly did not need
to channel the scene from Titanic where
Billy Zane chases Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet down the sinking ship with
a gun.
Yes the film is affecting
given the subject matter, how could it not be?
The intentions behind it are good and it is a story that left much of
the audience at the screening I attended silent as the end credits rolled. Most will leave the theater feeling pummeled
as the traumatic atrocities pile up without relent for the 134-minute running
time. Romantic historical epics like
Lean’s Zhivago, Warren Beatty’s Reds and even Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate rarely happen anymore so
it is refreshing to see filmmakers try to bring it back. And yet upon further
reflection, I grew annoyed that an important subject that must be told was in
service to a half-baked romance we’ve seen done to death. Somewhere in George’s latest is a good movie
if only it didn’t keep pushing that love story I could care less about in my
face every chance it could.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki