Film Review: ‘The Promise’

It’s hard to make a narrative film about genocide. In “Schindler’s List,” Steven Spielberg’s tragically lauded Holocaust kitsch, the plight of the Jewish people is reduced to plangent chronicles and treacly images arranged to extract maximum pain. Regardless of their historical accuracy, lushly-detailed period pieces about genocide are dramatically stacked against their characters and audiences. “The Promise,” a new depiction of the Armenian genocide, told mostly through the eyes of one terrorized family, suffers for many of the same reasons.

Oscar Isaac does his best to carry the woe of the Armenian people via his character Mikael, a small-town apothecary who moves to the big city, Constantinople, for medical school. He immediately befriends Emre Ogan (Marwan Kenzari), and handles his studies adroitly, removing cancerous spleens with ease.

The young men meet Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), an Armenian-by-way-of-Paris dance tutor, and her boyfriend Chris Myers (Christian Bale), a married-to-the-game AP reporter who is fueled by his scoops and self-importance. As bon mots are dispensed - “absinthe makes the heart grow fonder” - a love triangle develops between the three in a bohemian fever dream of 1914 Constantinople. But, just as the Masterpiece Theatre vibes are ratcheting up, history intervenes.

When Muslim Turks begin their campaign of extermination against the Christian Armenians, Mikael must belatedly return to his hometown, to his foreboding mother Marta (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and his lovely betrothed Maral (Angela Sarafyan, cast here for the same reason as she was selected for “Westworld” - she holds a world of pain in her eyes). In one sense, the promise of the film’s title is Mikael’s (instantly broken) one to Maral - he unconvincingly explains away his actions with the line, “It was a different life.”

The romance between Ana and Mikael is unseemly in other ways - they make love for the first time during the Armenian equivalent of Kristallnacht in Constantinople, their bodies backlit by the burning businesses of their brethren. That evening, like many others, are shown with insufficient historical context. What we see repeatedly is Ottoman army functionaries, each with a dark mustache atop an expressionless mouth, doing the most brutal things and explaining only that, “There is no war here.”

Isaac is wildly handsome and earnest and Bale is doggedly heroic, but almost every secondary character contorts him or herself into gobsmacking bad decisions and you realize that their actions are about maximizing martyrdom - one Armenian makes a sacrifice so that another can live, at least for an extra 15 minutes of screen time.

Director Terry George, an expert in suffering from his work set in Northern Ireland (e.g. “The Boxer,” “In the Name of the Rose”) and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe turn “The Promise” into a strangely beautiful film. They lens rich sets (the Iberian peninsula stands in for southern Turkey) suffused with warm light… even when that light falls upon the bodies of Armenians massacred beside a creek.

The film, budgeted at a robust $90M, features surprise cameos by esteemed actors like Jean Reno and James Cromwell, but their presence only confirms this is an odd sort of prestige picture, released to coincide with the all-too-obscure 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide rather than with awards season.

In the intervals between sweeping action sequences in “The Promise,” one wonders how, with everything we know, these pogroms keep happening - in a cruel climactic moment, the last hope for fleeing Armenians is that they reach what was then the safest haven: Aleppo, Syria. One of the few characters to make it to the end of the film exclaims, “Our revenge will be to survive,” but there is still more to hear on the subject than weeping violins.