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 Film puts violence under the microscope By CRAIG OUTHIER Get Out In the alarmingly wholesome opening moments of David Cronenberg's “A History of Violence,” we find gentle, peace-loving family man Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) comforting his little girl after a bad dream. “There's no such thing as monsters,” Tom intones, like countless parents before him, hunkered down on countless Sesame Street bedspreads. Of course, we know better. This being the domain of Cronenberg — the terrifically deranged Canadian director of “The Fly” and “Scanners” — monsters come with the territory. As does an identity crisis or two. And don't forget the gleefully gratuitous insert shots of splattered brain pans (a Cronenberg specialty!) and mangled, bullet-ridden torsos. What did you expect, “My Dinner With Andre”? So “A History of Violence” — based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke — is recognizably the work of its creator. It's also one of Cronenberg's most coherent and accessible films, a slicing if straightforward (deceptively straightforward, one might say) meditation on the contagious nature of bloodshed. Mortensen (“The Lord of the Rings”) is awesomely sympathetic as Stall, a handsome lug of a guy who looks and acts the part of a simple Midwesterner until a pair of itinerant killers stroll into his small-town diner. In a pulse-quickening flurry of smashed coffeepots and gunfire, Stall lethally dispatches the evildoers and sheepishly underplays his exploits when the national media brands him a hero. Naturally, the incident lures some unsavory creatures out of the woodwork. In short order, Stall is visited by Philadelphia gangster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), a one-eyed reptile of a man who recognizes Stall as a long-since-disappeared troublemaker named Joey Cusack, an assertion that Stall flatly denies. More interesting still are the dynamics between Stall and his sissified, pot-smoking son (Ashton Holmes) and his headstrong lawyer wife (Maria Bello from “Duets”), both of whom seem eager to draw Stall's violent propensities to the surface. In the wife's case, this manifests itself in an epic round of stairwell hate-sex. (And let's take this moment to applaud Bello, one of the few capable Hollywood actresses who isn't afraid to truly reveal herself.) If anything, Cronenberg commits too much of his energy to twists and turns of the story line and not enough to what actually makes Stall — as compelling a character as we've seen on a movie screen this year — tick. Even after the final neck is snapped, we're left with the nagging feeling that the most compelling scene is the one we never see. ‘A History of Violence’ |
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