Movie Review—The Promise

The Promise

by Peter J. O'Connell   

The Promise. Released: April 2017. Runtime: 132 mins. MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, including war atrocities, violence, and disturbing images and for some sexuality.

“Who remembers the Armenians?” Adolf Hitler is said to have made this remark when someone questioned whether the Fuehrer's desire to annihilate the Jews might cause future generations to condemn the Nazis. Well, some people, though not nearly enough, have remembered the genocidal attempt by the rulers of the Ottoman Empire to destroy the Armenian people that occurred during the World War I era, 25 years before Hitler's remark. Terry George, co-writer and director of The Promise, is one of those who remember.

The Promise begins in 1914 in a village in eastern Turkey, where Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks have lived together peacefully for generations as part of the Ottoman Empire. Mikael (Oscar Isaac), a brilliant young Armenian, wishes to go to medical school in Constantinople. He has become engaged to Maral (Angela Sarafyan), whose family has given him a dowry, which he will use to finance his education.

In Constantinople Mikael attracts attention for his brilliance and makes friends with both Turks and Armenians. He also becomes attracted to Ana (Charlotte LeBon), an Armenian woman raised in Paris, who is in an on-again/off-again relationship with Chris Myers (Christian Bale), an American journalist. In time Ana also feels attracted to Mikael. Soon the mutual attraction between the two becomes a romance.

In the meantime the Ottoman Empire allies with Germany in World War I and begins rounding up Armenians and encouraging mob violence against them. As a result of these events, Mikael is sent to a prison labor camp, from which he makes a dramatic escape and returns to his native village. But he finds that the Turks there also have turned against the Armenians. 

To save Maral, Mikael marries her, and the two take refuge in a mountain cabin, where she becomes pregnant. Various adventures and atrocities follow, and Mikael ends up with Ana and Chris at Musa Dagh, a mountain where Armenians have to fight off the Turkish army while hoping to be saved by the French navy. 

The Promise aspires to the epic status of a classic such as Dr. Zhivago (1965). The theme of a good, but conflicted, man trying to do right by both his wife and his true love in a time of turmoil is similar. (Both heroes are also doctors!) Oscar Isaac is the kind of all-purpose ethnic that Omar Sharif, star of Dr. Zhivago, was. Even the posters of the two movies are similar. 

But The Promise, despite its good intentions and the many good things in it, falls short of epic status. Sometimes its cinematography and production design bring scenes, whether of the glories of Constantinople or the bleakness of arid areas, to wondrous life; other times the feeling is of a kind of historical pageant with players in costume emoting in front of obvious sets. Despite the past achievements of the talented cast, they don't seem quite right here. Isaac sometimes overacts. The lovely LeBon never seems to reach the level of intensity that her character should attain. Bale's problem is the opposite of hers; he seems almost “too big” stylistically for his secondary role.

But even though The Promise doesn't fulfill its promise of being an epic, it is a worthy work that provides a place for one to start “remembering” one of the great tragedies of history, the Armenian Genocide. 

“Footnote” to the film: In the early 1960s, it was rumored that Paul Newman, after Exodus, might star in a film about the Armenian Genocide based on Franz Werfel's novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. But nothing became of the rumor.