The current example is David Cronenberg’s latest, A History of Violence, which I saw last night, and have been rolling around in my head ever since, coming up with a lot of half-theories and false starts. It’s the story of Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), a quiet man in a small Indiana town who owns a tiny little diner. Everything is very Capraesque and very well-observed: it’s a perfect little midwestern diorama.
Then, a couple of bad men come to the diner, and threaten one of Tom’s employees, making it clear that they will happily murder anyone who fucks with them. So Tom very quickly kills them both. While he deals with the enormity of this event, a man from the east coast arrives claiming to know Tom as Joey Cusack, a notorious killer.
That much, you know from the trailer. But this film is impossible to discuss in any meaningful way without spoiling it. And I very much feel that it deserves to be seen blind. So, rather than discuss this in any meaningful way, I might as well just get at some of the issues that I’ve been grappling with for the last twelve hours in the vaguest way I can.
First off, there’s a tension throughout the film between its lurid pulp elements and its outraged, humane core. On one level, this is a film which panders to the American love of gore, showcasing many violent deaths in loving detail. But somehow, it doesn’t play as exploitative violence. Indeed, the film makes you feel simply grotesque for enjoying some of the things it makes you enjoy.
To take an example: there is one sequence in which Tom’s teenaged son Jack starts physically attacking the bullies who have been harassing him. At this moment, the audience is excited – people in the theater with me were certainly laughing and cheering. But only a few moments later, Tom confronts Jack about the wrongness of resorting to violence to solve conflict. The film calls out the irony of Tom – a killer – lecturing his son about violent behavior, but quickly goes someplace darker: after Jack points out the discrepancy, Tom slaps him hard across the face. It’s an uncomfortable and shocking moment, that almost completely erases our enjoyment of the earlier scene, and even our sense of Tom as a hero. Later, when Jack again behaves violently, the audience and Tom are both torn between horror and admiration.
I don’t see this as a schizophrenic disconnect between the theme and the execution, as it is in Gladiator. Rather, I think theme comes out of the audience’s mixed feelings: if a film is about the endemic violence in American culture, how better to express that, really, than to rub the (presumptively) American viewer’s nose in blood and death? By focusing our attention on our curious need to idolize the violent among us, the film show that this tendency is inevitably destructive. Small wonder it was made by a Canadian.
All of which is just a scrap of the film; it’s themes of sex and personal identity are equally troubling and difficult. The final scene of the film plays like a nightmare version of It’s a Wonderful Life; or is it hopeful?
Having given you no reason to actually see the film, besides the assurance that if I could talk about it, it would be amazing, let me try this: the acting is uniformly suberb, especially Mortensen, and Maria Bello as his wife. Cronenberg, unsurprisingly, does great work behind the camera; I am not sure that this falls comfortably into the greater body of his work, but for some reason I can’t imagine anyone else directing it. The story, which at first seemed annoyingly episodic, seems to me now to mirror the workings in Tom’s mind. All very well put together and professional and good. Now go see the damn thing.
9/10