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David Cronenberg, the man who almost single-handedly created the notion of cinematic "body horror" with such genre classics as Crash and Videodrome, has always been a chilly, perverse director; even while exploring the outer fringes of sexuality, he invariably seems to maintain a cool distance from his films (the only possible exception to this is his surprisingly poignant take on The Fly). He's almost the love child of Ingmar Bergman and Joel Peter Witkin, with an artist's eye for true freakishness and a craftsman's firm grip of technique. While that almost-clinical detachment could work to great effect in the horror genre—for one thing, no one else does it - A History of Violence is not a horror film, and so begs the question: What happens when that style is applied to a mainstream drama? You get a big, bogus crapfest that looks (and smells) like every other big, bogus crapfest the poseurs and award-givers love to bestow their laurel wreaths on. Cronenberg and screenwriter Josh Olson have (very loosely) adapted a graphic novel to create this story of Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), Midwestern Everyman—husband, father of two, proprietor of a small-town diner, and a guy who just can't seem to get his truck running (that it miraculously starts by itself to advance the plot at one point is typical of the film's callous disregard for storytelling). His wife (Maria Bello) is a bottle-blond size-2 hottie who works as an attorney. Everything seems great until the day two mass murderers bust into Tom's diner, only to wind up on the menu when Tom shifts gears and goes Rambo on 'em. Unfortunately, it doesn't end there, as some Big City thugs (led by a heavily-scarred and accented Ed Harris) show up, claiming Tom is one of their own. By the end of the film we've also crossed paths with Syndicate Boss Richie Cusack (William Hurt, sporting an inexplicable Brigham Young beard and the most come-and-go accent since Kevin Costner shot an arrow through Robin Hood). The film's arty atmosphere (you know, long drifting camera shots, e-n-d-l-e-s-s pauses between line readings) would lead us to believe that Cronenberg is making some kind of statement about how violence begets violence; indeed, in interviews Cronenberg has stressed that his use of extreme effects to depict the outcome of violence (one man has a jaw shot away, another man has a nose punched right off) is to force us to look at what real violence is like. Unfortunately, this just ain't true. If we're supposed to witness the terrifying aftermath of violence, then why does Tom take bullets and then suffer nothing more than little dribbles of blood? If we're supposed to be repelled by the violence, then why set up good, decent characters and then offer violence as the only possible solution—it's either kill or be killed? A central twist involving Tom's background also negates this idea, when we realize that a story that's presented itself as dealing with the effects of violence on just an ordinary joe is really anything but. In fact, pretty much everything in A History of Violence is equally dishonest. Are we, for example, seriously expected to believe that Maria Bello, with her incredibly slim frame and neurotic Hollywood mannerisms, is an Indiana housewife? (Hey, my family is from Indiana and don't none of 'em look like her.) In these post-Sopranos times, can anyone really take seriously the notion of the crime boss who lives in a castle surrounded by an army of thugs? And are there really no people of color anywhere in either Indiana or Philadelphia? If, on the other hand, Cronenberg's intention was to make an Out of the Past or The Killers style crime thriller (both of which Violence seems to cob from, by the way), how are we to take the ludicrous action scenes in which Tom dodges bullets with the ease of a superhero? Would it have cost Cronenberg so much to hire a decent action choreographer who could have made these moments believable? Regardless of which scenario Cronenberg intended (and given the often sloppy direction and editing, who knows), the film is so impossibly riddled with plot gaps and holes it barely matters. His wife is an attorney, and yet she's never investigated his background? If we believe the central twist involving his character, Tom would have to be at least 50, and yet Viggo Mortensen of course is barely 40something. Viggo Mortensen struggles to stay ahead of this ridiculous material, and for the most part he does provide any tiny shred of veracity A History of Violence has. It doesn't help that poor Viggo and co-star Bello also have to enact two of the absolute worst sex scenes in cinematic history. In one Tom's wife dresses up as a cheerleader so they can pretend to be teenagers having sex . . . because, you know, that's really the only way adults can enjoy sex. The second sex scene is even more offensive, and offers up that most despicable of clichés: That women really enjoy being roughed up and imitating rape during sex. Cronenberg's films have always been obsessed with strange sex, but at least it never felt old and tired, and we knew we were supposed to find it nauseating. In A History of Violence, you'll probably just end up deciding to become celibate for a while and wondering why the attorney-wife doesn't have this jerk thrown in jail herself. Even Cronenberg regulars Peter Suschitzky (cinematographer) and Howard Shore (composer) seem to have fallen into the pretension trap this time around. Suschitzky occasionally provides big crane shots that seem to exist for no other reason than to provide big crane shots, and Shore's score steals so many Bernard Herrmann riffs that somebody oughta notify Herrmann's estate. Only Ed Harris as mid-level badass Carl Fogarty emerges unscathed from this disaster. Although his character is about as clichéd as a school bully (this film's got one'a those, too), Harris brings bristling menace and black humor to the role. His performance seems to gleefully acknowledge the story's pulp essence and wallow in it, and it's too bad his work didn't rub off on the rest of A History of Violence.
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Gemma's observation really struck me (obviously, since I'm recounting it years after the fact). Even with his big Hollywood breakthrough, 1986's The Fly, and his very Ken Loach-flavored take on Spider, Cronenberg's vision has felt as purely North of the Border as Farley Mowat . . . that is, Farley Mowat by way of severe exposure to mutagens, and with a few external placentas expressing his internal rage. But you get the idea. To look at A History of Violence, you'd think Cronenberg was as fresh and American as wind-blown Iowa corn. In crafting a movie about role-playing, Cronenberg has put on a mask of All-American wholesomeness in order to stick his fingers under the mask of All-American wholesomeness that the US presents to itself and the world. And he gives that mask a nice healthy tug. Nothing is real in A History of Violence. How can you attack a destructive myth, if you don't enter the world of that myth? To borrow a truism from Stephen R. Boyett's "Emerald City Blues," you can't lead an air strike on Oz from this side of the Rainbow. A History of Violence is set in a world of fundamentalist fable, not a fundamentalism of faith, but of national identity, carved out of equal parts John Ford, John Wayne, and the Turner Thesis. Of course Viggo's Tom Stall, family man and pillar of the community, is a handsome, strong man of the soil. He'd have to be. My God! What if Injuns captured Natalie Wood, and he had to chase after them for a few years? Of course Maria Bello's Edie Stall is a strong and beautiful blond who's a lawyer, who faces adversity with the quiet dignity of any crusading lawyer, reporter, doctor, virologist (fill in fantasy dream job here) featured in a Lifetime made-for-cable movie. Of course Ashton Holmes as Tom's son Jack is a troubled lad, plagued by a school bully and by boring Saturday nights in his hometown of Millbrook that look like something out of a James Dean pictorial in a 1954 issue of Look. Adorable little Heidi Hayes looks like the gene splice of a Village of the Damned tot and the glowing, Shirley Temple-like brats you see printed on the plastic bags that envelope feathery-light supermarket enriched white bread. Nothing is real, but that doesn't mean that it's not dangerous, because on some level it is believed. In A History of Violence, this is perhaps most evident on the bullshit "hero" rhetoric used by the fictive local newscasters in the movie, after Tom has "risen" to the challenge presented to him in his humble diner/place of business/homestead. This cheeseball rhetoric fits right in with the mythic All-American physical and spiritual landscape of History; it's the nightly-news cheeseball rhetoric that's built on this deeply pathological notion that the honest, homespun strength of the Heartland comes from the testosterone of the men who tamed it. This rhetorical mythology would be as quaint as, say, the mythology of a nation like Norway, featuring Thor and the Midgard Serpent, if this mythology weren't the cornerstone of actual fucking US policy (at least as it's sold domestically). Howard Shore's score is a vicious part of the savaging that is A History of Violence. Longtime Cronenberg collaborator Shore seems to steal from Virgil Thompson's mythic score for The River (which was purloined by director Nicholas Meyer for 1983's The Day After). The River is a movie that itself nurtures and expands upon the mythic status of the Mississippi in America's identity, and when you consider that The River is essentially a work of propaganda, well, the implications are kinda dark, no? How can Cronenberg, that most Canadian of directors, lead such a brutal assault on the very kind of Americana that makes Michael Bay's shorts damp with pre-ejaculate (and that makes Michael Bay such a valid target of parody, an entire film, Team America, could be built around lampooning him)? Well, there's precedent, isn't there? In the 1940s and 1950s, film noir, that most intensely and hyperbolically American of film genres, was not created by American directors, but by outsiders... immigrants and refugees to the US from Germany and Eastern Europe: Fritz Lang; Boris Ingster; Michael Curtiz; Edgar G. Ulmer; Otto Preminger and others. Cronenberg, like other outsiders, can gain a concentrated perspective that directors born in the US can't. This is what allows Cronenberg to do US mythology what he did to Jeff Goldblum's DNA in The Fly. Yeah, part of that mythic identity is that very film noir essence that Cronenberg cribs from; Lisa's dead-on right when she mentions Out of the Past (directed by Frenchman Jacques Tourneur) and The Killers (directed by German Robert Siodmak) as things from which Cronenberg steals. But I think this theft is not just a viral glomming onto film noir. I think it's a dynamic engaging of film noir within the "search and destroy" mission parameters that Cronenberg has set out for himself. Narratively, Cronenberg steals from noir, but visually, he steals from Westerns. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, a veteran of some of Peter Watkin's most daring shoots back in the '60s, like The War Game and The Gladiators, creates a Midwest that's as visually quiet as the calm just before Apache arrows fly. It's the aural and visual quiet of A History of Violence that's maybe the most striking about the movie. There is, amidst these picture postcard shots of landscape, farmscape, home and community, a seething . . . well . . . violence that bubbles just under the surface. The opening shots of the film, showing the aftermath of carnage, are dominated by a chorus of happy, summery cicadas. Throughout History, Cronenberg wields quiet to such devastating effect, he can use other bugs as the chorus of the film's climax; as Tom faces the bad guys, Cronenberg shoots the scene downward from a second floor window, as flies buzz against the panes. When Cronenberg shatters the silences he's created, the effects are pretty goddam remarkable. A History of Violence is one of the most violent movies ever made, not so much physically violent (though there is plenty of that), but intellectually violent to an idea. In terms of content and themes, it dovetails with Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, which also dealt with the insipient violence of American identity. The last lines of Straw Dogs, about finding your way home, are in an indirect way answered by the finale of A History of Violence. I don't know if the answer provided is really correct, but it's a good answer, for the time being at least.
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