The Promise Review
I can promise you one thing about this film: you’ll get bored watching it. Despite the efforts of stars Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale, and Charlotte Le Bon, the film just plains fails to make the events it depicts interesting, especially since you can tell where the film is going from the opening five minutes. Let’s get into the review.
The Promise opens with Mikael, played by Oscar Isaac, getting engaged to his wife-to-be, and getting a sac of 400 gold coins from his father-in-law to be, since this is what he needs to go to Constantinople to become a doctor, and not just a pharmacist, but he promises to return as soon as he can to marry the daughter. Once he arrives, though, he becomes fascinated with the dancer Ana, who teaches Mikael’s relatives. Ana is married to American journalist, Chris Meyers, played by Christian Bale, and he is in town to cover what will eventually erupt into the Armenian Genocide. As things get touchy for Armenians living in Constantinople, Mikael eventually gets transported to a labor camp, escapes, and returns home. In the meantime, Chris continues his reporting with Ana at his side, and even after Mikael marries and impregnates his fiance, he can’t shake his feelings for Ana as she as Chris are in the area moving out orphaned children.
So even though this film wasn’t my favorite, I can say a few good things for it. The acting is great: Isaac, Bale, and Le Bon all give really nice performances and the direction from Terry George helps with great production and costume designs, nice camera work, and a nice musical score. In particular, when there’s some fighting scenes toward the end of the film, which is a nice change of pace from the slow dramatic romance that take up almost the entirety of the first act and feel like they linger long into the second act, that are well executed, shot and edited. Perhaps George should follow this up with a more action-packed adventure and I think that would be a great pairing. Sure, there is a darker moment toward the end that does have a bit of an emotional impact, but other than that Mikael’s story had no effect on me. Also, stay through the first part of the credits. There’s a song by Chris Cornell titled “The Promise”, which is excellent. I hope that the film lingers enough so that the song is considered at Oscar time. It’s that good.
Now for the criticisms, and there’s a few: well, first of all, when you have your main character make “the promise” in the opening five minutes of the movie, you can tell where everything is heading, especially since Charlotte Le Bon doesn’t play his fiance. You know that the love story is going to erupt as soon as he sees Ana for the first time and the way Bale behaves in his first couple of scenes you know she’s not exactly satisfied with Chris so that the next two hours and ten minutes of Ana bouncing around between the two men becomes completely worthless since we know that’s all the film has in mind. And again, there is absolutely nothing that makes this love story interesting. I mean, we can go back to some of the great forbidden love stories through time, and I gotta be honest, I saw this film then later that day saw a special anniversary screening of The Graduate (1967), which has its fair share of forbidden romance elements, but that film, which was out 50 years before this one, had more wit, intelligence, and surprises up its sleeve in its opening twenty minutes than this two hour and fifteen minute drag. Also the key element to making any on-screen romance work is chemistry, and frankly Isaac and Le Bon have less chemistry than your grandfather’s homemade chemistry set which has been sitting in the attic for sixty-plus years. Bale and Le Bon, who I guess we’re not supposed to like together, have more chemistry and I think I enjoyed their scenes together more than the scenes between Mikael and Ana. Also James Cromwell shows up out of nowhere late in the third act as an American ambassador of sorts trying to help get Chris out of a pickle, and I felt his character is one of the more important ones that late in the film, but there’s no build up, he just shows up and exits just as quickly. I felt they needed to build that up much better if it’s supposed to be so important.
I guess I could go on further, but I think you get the point. Now I’m not against the subject matter of the film. It’s an important one. The fact that still today the Turkish government denies the Armenian Genocide is just plain wrong, and the film had the potential to be to the Armenian Genocide what films like Schindler’s List (1993) and Life is Beautiful (1998) were to The Holocaust. I’m not saying eliminate the love story entirely, they can help get us involved with the characters the way Benigni did with Life is Beautiful, and that had a huge impact when the lovers are separated, and at the same time you can keep the dramatic elements like Spielberg did with Schindler’s List, but this could have been a wonderful movie with a great subject matter, but instead it’s kind of a dud that makes the audience curious about the conflict and the genocide, but not enough for them to become fully invested in the characters. Sure, there might be some out there who just love those kind of forbidden love stories, no matter how predictable they get, and if you’re one of those people, more power to you, but while I like those, I need something to separate it from all the other forbidden love stories we get. The Promise fails to live up to that.
My rating: 4/10.
