"That" Movie

A History of Violence

Directed by david cronenberg

A History of violence is a gangster film, a western, a meditation on identity and karma and a charnel house where characters get shot, maimed and beaten; the damage is often admired in close-ups, the better to appreciate the texture of torn, bloodied flesh. But despite the material's graphic novel roots, and the story's familiar, stalwart-family-man-versus-slimeball-criminals storyline, you can rest assured that you're not watching one of "those" movies-i.e., those unremarkable revenge thrillers that might once have starred someone like Charles Bronson or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude van Damme-because the director is David Cronenberg, and David Cronenberg would never make a movie like that. Or would he?

This is the kind of movie where dark-suited gangsters descend on an Edenic small town and bully a quiet man into standing up for his home and family. The title could double as the title of a book about violent cinema, or a biography of its director, who's no stranger to graphic bloodletting; with such a pedigree, it's no wonder that the movie is already being hailed as an Oscar contender, a subversive statement on American bloodlust (and American movie bloodlust) and, most importantly, Cronenberg's first commercially viable picture since The Fly. Yet I had trouble taking it seriously, and there are times when Cronenberg seems to tip his hand and let you know that he's not taking it all that seriously, either.

Loosely based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke-which, in fairness, was a lot more sadistic and shallow than the movie-Violence stars Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, a husband and father whose life is turned upside down when, much to everyone's surprise, he kills two serial killers who show up in his coffee shop and try to terrorize the customers and staff. (The plot is all twists, and this review is all spoilers.)

Prior to the showdown, which makes Tom into a temporary media hero, he's depicted as an even-tempered sweetheart who shares a lovely country farmhouse with his two charming kids and his gorgeous lawyer wife, Edie (Maria Bello). It's a domestic ideal, a fact duly noted in a moment of post-sex cuddling. "I'm the luckiest son of a bitch alive," Tom tells Edie. "You're the best man I know," she coos back at him, "There's no luck involved." That's screenwriter Josh Olson's way of letting you know that this ideal can't last; it's the conscientious film student's version of that mandatory scene in a big, dumb action picture where the tough cop hero's goodhearted sidekick hauls out photos of the boat he plans to retire on.

Tom's heroism inspires his son Jack (Ashton Holmes) to savagely beat the school bullies who used to intimidate him (who knew this droll, skinny kid could kick ass?) and prompts a visit from the aforementioned gangsters, led by Ed Harris playing a one-eyed boss whose pale, puckered skull is like a death mask, and who taunts Tom by calling him Joey, the name of a long-vanished Philadelphia hitman.

If you've ever seen a Cronenberg movie, any Cronenberg movie, you know where this is headed. Tom's protestations that he's not Joey don't jibe with his Steven Seagal-like capacity for dispatching goons; he's vague about his past, even with his wife and kids, and his son's newfound knack for bloodletting is not learned, but genetically encoded. Tom has a history of violence, you see, and Jack represents a continuation of that history-a history Tom can no longer deny, just as America can no longer deny its own propensity toward violent culture, violent thoughts and violent deeds, etcetera.

The movie's apple-pie visualization of small town life is pretty much what you've come to expect in aestheticized art house pulp about the dark underbelly of America; it plays like the Norman Rockwell-from-hell scenes in Born on the Fourth of July and Blue Velvet, only cooler and less lyrical. One of the few such scenes where Cronenberg seems to loosen up and become his old, cryptically bemused, emotionally complex self, is a sexual encounter between Tom and Edie in which Edie indulges a dirty cheerleader fantasy. That funny, sweet moment aside, Violence feels programmed.

It's Cronenberg's attempt to play around with standard-issue heartland iconography, a task all English-language filmmakers must attempt every few years to get everyone's attention and prove they're not just making movies for themselves. It's Canadian Americana with a "you reap what you sow" message, a foreigner's pared down, mythic visualization of American malaise.

The problem is, unlike similarly afflicted heroes-Clint Eastwood's character in Unforgiven, say, or even Tom Hanks' hitman in the graphic novel-derived, thematically similar Road to Perdition-Tom doesn't really reap what he sows. He's forced to account for his decades-long deception and justify it to his wife and kids, but after that, he's permitted to tie up the nasty loose ends from his criminal past and return to a sullied, but still intact, home life. The spiral of violence Tom is forced into doesn't derail his life; it's just a speed bump.

The movie's wordless final exchange between Tom and his family-set around a dinner table haloed in warm light, and capped with one of the most effective cuts-to-black in recent movies-seems to subvert the a-man's?gotta-do clichés.

But it really doesn't. There's no sense of lasting emotional violation because, aside from a couple of marvelously frank sex scenes between Tom and Edie-the most emotionally unstable and complicated moments in the whole film-we've never really been given the chance to see these characters as more than movie archetypes: the reformed killer reluctantly drawn into one last series of showdowns, the betrayed wife who rallies to stand by her man, the softhearted young acolyte of the hero (Tom's son Jake) who embraces violence and is appalled to discover that he's good at it.

The movie's moral algebra is more simplistic than the Cronenberg norm. In The Fly, to name just one previous, better Cronenberg movie about divided identities, evolution and the frailty of flesh, we were torn between rooting for the transformed hero to save his larva-impregnated girlfriend and kill her possessive ex-lover, and being appalled by Brundle's acid-spewing, flesh-melting violence; we ultimately realized that in rooting for Brundle's rampage (a moviegoer's instinctive reaction), we were rooting against the remnants of his humanity. For all this new film's faintly comical shiftiness (in the most blessedly self-conscious moment, Tom admits he chose the rhetorically ripe surname Stall because "It was available") the hero is never placed in such an ironic, morally unstable position, and his mayhem never backfires on the audience's sympathies. Despite Mortensen's intriguing hint of blankness, Tom is mostly presented as a Spartan sweetie-pie who loves his family; his enemies are such taunting, cackling swine that Tom can feel free to splatter them like roaches.

Despite Peter Suschitzky's elegiac, whisky-dark lighting, Howard Shore's depressive horror film score and other promising elements, Violence is actually Cronenberg's most structurally, morally and emotionally conventional film. Despite its clinical title, superficially melancholy and knowing tone, it ultimately depicts "good" violence that unquestionably solves more problems than it creates-i.e., unreal, wish-fulfillment violence masquerading as something more troubling. The self-consciously mythic architecture feels inorganic, superimposed to lend a veneer of seriousness to pulp that wouldn't otherwise be taken seriously.

Violence's role in Cronenberg's filmography is much like that of The Brothers Grimm to Gilliam, and of Cape Fear to Scorsese: a calling card movie from a great and important director who, by all rights, ought to be exempt from this sort of thing. A History of Violence is the movie Cronenberg has to make in order to keep making movies. It's not a manifesto, but an insurance policy.