‘A History of Violence’ too poignant to explain
www.joblo.comA History of Violence
4/5 Stars
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, William Hurt, Ed Harris
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Now Playing: AMC Esquire, Chase Park Plaza
Is David Cronenberg the most devious filmmaker we have? His films, from “Dead Ringers” to “Crash” (the 1996 version) seem to be made with the intention of frustrating analysis. He hasn’t gotten any easier to pin down, but what he’s made with “A History of Violence” seems to be a pastiche of action films, a brief illumination of our American fantasies of violence. Granted, it’s not a new idea. But, as Cronenberg tells it, it’s one that deserves another look.
A second question: has there ever been an action film purely about action, as “A History of Violence” is? One that investigates our attraction to brutality without condemning it, that uses violence not to explore another topic, as an extension of character or natural forces, as spectacle, camp or a means to toy with the genre?
We’re introduced to Tom Stall, father of two, played by Viggo Mortensen, the soft-spoken owner of an improbably quaint diner in Millbrook, Ind. But he used to be Joey Cusack, a psychotic Philadelphia mobster who skipped town after some murders years ago and made himself into an entirely different man.
The transformation isn’t as complete as Tom might hope. When his diner is robbed in a random hold-up, he guns down the offending parties as smoothly as he makes the soup of the day. (Like riding a bicycle, I guess.) Stall is celebrated as a small-town hero and quickly tracked down by his old associates, who are not as chummy as one might hope.
This is all handled with something less than the utmost seriousness. “A History of Violence” is a movie of small, pure pleasures, and, as in most narratives, they come mostly from the villains. Ed Harris, as a one-eyed gangster, has far more fun than most directors allow. He relishes his own appearance in this cheerful country setting and his own power of corruption on the place. You can hear it when he thanks Tom for taking care of “those two bad men,” sharpening the end of the sentence like a born orator. You can see it in his talk with Edie Stall (Maria Bello); he seems on the verge of laughter while asking her in mock-seriousness why her husband “is so good at killing people” and then teases her about her shoes and cracks up entirely.
Cronenberg scrubs out as much as he can get from his films without washing away their meaning, leaving us with an airtight, elegant surface that resists our assigning it significance. The action scenes in this film are where the world breaks down, and Cronenberg incorporates Hollywood techniques into his own system (a bullet-stuffed body plunging through plate glass, etc.). All the while he amplifies brutality with close-ups of smashed faces and of heads with gun wounds and a comic surreality (an odd temporal distortion, where Tom seems free to hit a man’s face in the same way three times while the thug remains motionless). There’s even the occasional, blatant jab at convention: we see both of the mob bosses in the film turn their backs, confident that Tom will be killed, in the entire span of time it takes him to defeat their henchmen.
At the film’s end, a question of character is left hanging: what made psychopathic Joey decide to be nice-guy Tom? Cronenberg could have found the answer trite or never asked himself the question. But he takes the characters (if not the plot) of his film seriously. Maybe when he looked at Mortensen’s practiced, thoughtfully stylized performance, he decided Tom Stall was too good a character to be explained. We know as much about Tom from the way he carries himself as we learn from all the film’s exposition, and we recognize the difference in the way Joey moves and looks at people immediately. One would do both Mortensen and Cronenberg a disservice by thinking them intentionally shallow- they’re just too precise to be summarized.
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