Doctor Zhivago it ain’t, but this shines light on a dark past

The Promise (12A) Verdict: Unsubtle history lesson ★★★✩✩

The Promise is a sweeping period melodrama that takes itself jolly seriously in a (half- successful) bid to evoke the kind of epic pictures David Lean used to make.

Set in the early years of World War I, it stars Oscar Isaac as Mikael, a humble but s mart Armenian apothecary who yearns to become a doctor.

he marries a nice village girl whose dowry enables him to study medicine in distant Istanbul, but there he falls in love with a sexy ballet teacher, An a( Charlotte Le Bon, pictured with Isaac), who in turn is being courted by Chris, a hotheaded American photo-journalist (Christian Bale). how many photo-journalists were knocking around Turkey in 1915, or anywhere for that matter, is open to question. Whatever, as the love triangle develops, Bale’s character helps to illuminate a more specific purpose to director Terry George’ s film: its attempt to educate us about the alleged slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks, the so-called Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1917.

George, I might add, comes from Belfast, where in the Seventies he was involved with the Irish National Liberation Army and sentenced to six years in Long Kesh prison.

Several of his films, such as Some Mother’s Son (1996) about the 1981 hunger strikes in Long Kesh ( better known as The Maze), have reflected his Irish Republican leanings and have not, to put it mildly, been notably balanced. That’s useful background information when it comes to assessing The Promise, which was bankrolled by the late, U.S.-Armenian billionaire Kirk Kerkorian. The film offers George an opportunity to address what he evidently considers another mighty historical wrong, and it too is tilted only one way, towards the view that the Turks behaved contemptibly and the Armenians nobly. This picture does not wear its sympathies lightly.

Of course, there is plenty of objective analysis to show that the numbers of massacred Armenians at that time have not been wildly exaggerated, as Turkey still claims.

And it is certainly an atrocity, almost within living memory, that has received strikingly little cinematic attention. But The Promise rather overdoes the background history lesson, to the extent that the foreground romance often looks like what effectively it is: a vehicle struggling under the weight of its own worthy load.

Luckily, in Isaac, Bale and Le Bon, and strong support including James Cromwell as the U.S. ambassador, the film has the cast to disguise, if not entirely overcome, its flaws. Doctor Zhivago it emphatically is not, but it still looks great. As history lessons go, at least this one is sumptuously presented.