director
David Cronenberg
screenwriter
Josh Olson
based on
the graphic novel by
John Wagner
Vince Locke
producers
Chris Bender
David Cronenberg
J.C. Spink
cinematographer
Peter Suschitzky
music
Howard Shore
editor
Ronald Sanders
cast
Viggo Mortensen (Tom Stall)
Maria Bello (Edie Stall)
William Hurt (Richie Cusack)
Ed Harris (Carl Fogarty)
Ashton Holmes (Jack Stall)
Heidi Hayes (Sarah Stall)
Stephen McHattie (Leland Jones)
Greg Bryk (Billy Orser)
Peter MacNeill (Sheriff Sam Carney)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 96m
u.s.
release: 9/24/03
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other david
cronenberg films
reviewed on this website:
- crash
- eXistenZ
|
In A History of Violence,
brutality hurts and has sickening consequences in a way it hasn't
in any American movie since Unforgiven.
Men expire inconveniently, gurgling face-down in their own blood
on a diner floor; they get pounded in the face until the nose
effectively disappears in a smear of cartilage and ripped skin.
The movie, however, sets up situations in which we want, need,
the killing and maiming to happen. The tension builds in a slow
boil, then ignites furiously when we're not quite ready for it.
Man is a violent species, and director David Cronenberg, who
has spent thirty years studying that species in such films as
Dead Ringers and The Fly, implicates his
audience and himself in the violence, as he did in 1982's grotesque
Videodrome. The theme of the movie could be: Killing
feels good until it's over -- then what do you do?
The mystery of the film, adapted
loosely from a mediocre 1997 graphic novel by John Wagner (writer)
and Vince Locke (artist), is whether small-town diner owner Tom
Stall (Viggo Mortensen) -- an aw-shucks guy to all appearances
-- is hiding dark and bloody secrets from his past. One night,
a couple of thieves and thrill-killers invade Tom's diner. (Aside:
Suzanne Vega's song of the same name -- I am waiting at the
counter/For the man to pour the coffee -- will take on inadvertent
macabre humor after this film.) Tom dispatches them with suspicious
ease, is crowned a local media hero, and attracts the attention
of shadowy men led by a scarred Ed Harris (dropping his usual
intensity and coming across all the more frightening), who seems
convinced that Tom is actually a man named Joey Cusack, from
back in Philly. We assume that Joey, whoever he is, wasn't a
kindly city hot-dog vendor or puppy breeder.
Cronenberg isn't terribly interested
in artificial mysteries, though. Nor is he all that impressed
with the novel's emphasis on mob connections. What he's after
is simple: Is the human machine hard-wired for violence, and
what happens when the machine tries to rewire itself? Tom, played
with effortless precision in moments both cruel and gentle by
Mortensen, is a classic movie figure -- the man capable of ghastly
carnage who has chosen a peaceful path until circumstances force
his hand. In Cronenberg's hands, this neo-western becomes a meditation
on the essence of all those movies. Family life (civilization)
is nurturing; killing is exciting. But switch "killing"
with "going to strip clubs" or the disreputable bachelor
pastime of your choice, and you have a metaphor for how a man
changes -- or doesn't -- when he opts for the credibility of
wife and children.
A great deal of the movie's
impact depends not on Viggo Mortensen but on Maria Bello, who
should be ready to take over the planet any day now. She plays
Tom's wife Edie, a lawyer who, I think, was attracted to safe
homespun Tom and his small-town life and moved away from city
stress (her voice still has an urban cadence; Tom has an Indiana
drawl that eventually slides into something more threatening
and razory). Edie finds Tom exciting, going so far as to recreate
the innocent devirginizing neither of them really had, fantasizing
being a cheerleader in bed with her quarterback boyfriend. The
first of the movie's sex scenes is warm and playful (unusual
for Cronenberg); the second, a thrashing and bruising event on
a stairwell after Edie discovers the truth about Tom, is considerably
uglier, more disturbing, and -- this being a Cronenberg film
-- more erotic. Bello performs in both scenes, and everything
in between, with deeply committed delicacy. We believe in her
love and her revulsion.
A History of Violence is of a piece with Cronenberg's other
work, though it seems to offer easier catharsis (but doesn't
really). A confrontation late in the movie between Tom and a
bad man played with cool, self-amused malevolence by William
Hurt is played out almost as drawing-room comedy, with the violence
no longer painful because we're now in a world where life is
meaningless. Ultimately, we find Tom at the dinner table with
his son -- who seems infected with his father's virus of swift
retributive force -- and his little daughter and Edie, and volumes
of the unspoken pass between man and wife. That's the movie's
true mystery, and the one Cronenberg prefers to leave us with:
Then what do you do?
|