Skip to main content

The Promise Exposes a Mass Tragedy


          I really wish The Promise had a less generic title. The film from Hotel Rwanda director Terry George, which may be the first cinematic examination of the Armenian Genocide, deserves a title more memorable and unique than simply "The Promise" (the poster is also pretty bad too). Unlike the title, this film is certainly not bland.
          The film follows an Armenian medical student Mikael (Oscar Isaac) studying in Constantinople during the last days of the Ottoman Empire. While there he falls for an Armenian-born French woman Ana (Charlotte Le Bon) who’s in a relationship with an Associated Press reporter Chris Meyers (Christian Bale). After the First World War breaks out, Mikael is horrified to discover the Ottoman government beginning an extermination of the Armenian people, and he is thrust into the conflict.
          It’s very important for historical films, especially when depicting such a great atrocity, to be careful and sensitive as to how its portrayed while also maintaining accuracy. For the most part, The Promise deals with this very well. The detail with which it shows the brutality of the army towards Armenian villagers is disturbing, as is the intensity of their power, and the danger to Mikael and his loved ones. I also really like how the film frames the events from his point of view. He doesn’t always know what’s going on and why, he’s just all of a sudden become a target merely for his regional ethnicity. He can’t even put a specific face to his misery. Additionally, the film doesn’t lose track of the frightful conditions it’s trying to relate.
          Oscar Isaac is very good in this, possibly one of the best performances I’ve seen from him. He portrays the grief and confusion of his character thoroughly well and even has a convincing accent. Charlotte Le Bon, a Quebecois actress, is also good if lacking in agency. We see she cares about orphans and is generally kind, but don’t have a whole lot else to go on as to her personality. Christian Bale is pretty good too, elevating what would be an admirable but uninteresting resistance fighter in a lesser actors’ hands. Marwen Kenzari plays Emre, a friend of Mikael’s in Constantinople who goes through an interesting arc. The beautiful and genuinely Armenian Angela Sarafyan plays Mikael’s home-town betrothed, Maral, and James Cromwell makes a pleasant appearance as the American ambassador. The film also features Jean Reno (who I haven’t seen in a while), Rade Serbedzija, Shoreh Aghdashloo, and in an unfortunate bit of casting, Tom Hollander -a good English actor who should never play an Armenian captive. 
          The chief factor that hurts this movie is the love triangle. Love triangles are rarely a good thing in movies as they typically feel like manufactured drama. In this movie, the romantic scenes are almost just padding, and it never seems to indicate who Ana’s more in love with. And the presence of Mikael’s wife Maral from early on (a sweet character for what we see of her) complicates things further, making for a love quartet essentially. It also doesn’t help that though Isaac, Le Bon, and Bale are good actors on their own, they don’t have the believable chemistry, at least not enough to sell the kind of war romance the film is going for. Doctor Zhivago, when it first came out, was likewise criticized for its focus on a love triangle more than the Russian Revolution it was set against. But apart from clearly being a character-driven story, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie were wonderful together, making for what I still consider a great movie. The Promise doesn’t have that, and it’s a mark in its favour that the love triangle story is secondary to the story of the genocide.
          My other qualm is that this film clearly wants to raise awareness of the extent of the Armenian Genocide the same way Schindler’s List did for the Holocaust, but George wrote a fictionalized story for it, and not a terribly original one at that. It still works, but I feel the impact would have resonated more if it was a true story being told. And there are definitely interesting true stories to tell. For example, Bale’s character has a lot in common with Armin Wegner, a German reporter and photographer stationed in Turkey who protested the slaughter. And Mehmet Celal Bey, a prominent politician, earned the moniker “the Turkish Oscar Schindler” for saving hundreds of Armenians in his resistance to the government. These stories would arguably lend more weight to a film for their basis in facts and it’s a shame George didn’t take that opportunity.
          Nonetheless, The Promise is an important film if for nothing else, it’s honest portrayal of a series of massacres that should not be forgotten. It’s shot well, performed well, and it informs well. I wish the love triangle wasn’t there, or at least that it was portrayed differently; and I think a film about this subject matter would’ve worked better if conveyed with a true story (and again, I really dislike the title). However I have to acknowledge that the Armenian Genocide is not as widely known as other atrocities like the Holocaust, and it should be. A film like this is a good step towards that.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more