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Trailer
Official Site
Director: David Cronenberg
Producer:Toby Emmerich, David Cronenberg, J.C.
Spink, Chris Bender
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt,
Ashton Holmes, Heidi Hayes, Peter MacNeill
MPAA
Rating: R
Year of Release: 2005
A film review by Chris Barsanti
Those well schooled in the history of cinema (or who've just seen a
movie or two in their time) cannot help but look at the scenes of
idyllic content occupying most of the beginning of A History of
Violence without knowing that something bad is coming to bust up this
happy family unit. Of course, they're helped along by the fact that the
film opens on a chillingly calm scene - composed almost entirely of one
tracking shot - in which a pair of laconic crooks on the lam execute a
number of people in a small motel with about as much emotion as they'd
use to pick up their dry cleaning. While the killers and the happy
family are obviously on a collision course, it's not the violent impact
that matters so much as the almost more shocking aftermath, and the
secrets it may uncover.
Viggo
Mortensen (in a welcome return to acting after too much time barking
orders in elvish and swinging a broadsword from horseback) plays Tom
Stall, a family man who runs a diner in a small Indiana town. He's not
originally from the town, but he's been there long enough that everyone
has long ago accepted him as one of their own. It's a normal life,
Tom's young daughter has nightmares and his geeky teenage son Jack gets
picked on at school, but other than that, things are good. Then the
killers come into the diner right before closing, and just as they're
about to execute a waitress, Tom springs into action, gunning them both
down in spectacular fashion. Tom becomes a local celebrity but seems
traumatized by the whole affair, wishing it could just be put behind
him.
At
this point, it seems that A History of Violence will become a
meditation on killing and what it does to people. Although the director
is David Cronenberg, and the diner scene is shot with appropriately
bloody physicality (few filmmakers have as much affinity for the
frailty of the human body), most of the film has so far had a quiet
grace to it that calls to mind A Map of the World, another story about
the after-effects of death in the heartland. Then Carl Fogaty (Ed
Harris, half his face scarred by barbed wire and with one mostly dead
eye) walks in with a couple of goons and things go in quite a different
direction. Especially after Fogaty asks Stall's wife Edie (Maria Bello)
why she thinks "Tom" is so good at killing people?
Cronenberg
has a tricky task to pull off here, juggling between his cool
dissection of violence and the sickening trauma it leaves behind -
nobody is left unscarred, physically or spiritually, here - and the
scenes of over-the-top brutality which he stages later in the film with
scenery chewers like Harris (never better, in a Grand Guignol sense)
and William Hurt (who should never play a mobster, ever). Some of it
evokes a knowing sort of laughter and some is simply pulverizing in its
visceral impact, especially the collateral damage wrought on Tom's
family. The result is a surprisingly entertaining film that still
leaves you with a sickening residue in the pit of your stomach.
More
so than some of Cronenberg's more gothic contraptions (Crash, The Fly),
A History of Violence exists for the most part in the real world, even
if some of the criminal elements seem to have wandered in from a
straight-to-video piece of hackwork, and it's all the more gruesome for
that reality. Is there a message in the end? Not likely, but there's
also much more roiling beneath the surface here - the lies people tell
to live with themselves, what precisely it means to kill someone - than
may be apparent on a single viewing.
A film that's hard to shake, it sticks with you like a virus.
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