Two guys stumble out of a motel early one morning. They look as
though they could just be a pair of businessmen making a road trip until they
start talking about how they need to avoid the cities during their drive. The
older man goes to check them out of the motel, while the younger guy pulls the car up to the
main office. When the older buy comes out, his buddy asks what took him so long,
and he replies that he had a problem with the maid. Just when they’re about to
leave, the men discover that they need to refill their bottle of drinking water.
The younger guy goes into the office, stepping around the bodies of the motel
manager and his wife, the maid. When he’s surprised by the dead couple’s young
daughter, the man calmly pulls out a revolver and shoots the little girl as
easily as he’s getting the water.
Leave it to director David Cronenberg to hit the viewer over the head with a
shocking opening scene that’s filled with the type of soul-deadening, casual
killing that’s all too frequent these days--both in films as well as in real
life. And when we are introduced to Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) his wife Edie
(Maria Bello), a loving couple with two children who are living the American
Dream in a small town in Indiana, we know full well that they are on a collision
course with these stone-cold killers. Yet in the hands of any other director, A
History Of Violence would be just another complacent action/thriller pot-boiler
where the hero not only fights off the bad guys, but achieves a sense of poetic
justice while doing so. But Cronenberg, in adapting the graphic novel by John
Wagner and Vince Locke, has a lot more on his mind than just telling the overly
simplistic story of a man fighting off outside threats to his family. He
instills Violence with a deeper resonance that makes it stand head and shoulders
over its brethren in the action/thriller/suspense genres.
Make no mistake, on the surface, A History Of Violence is a gripping suspense
thriller. But it’s also an intelligent film that’s filled with very realistic
people, starting with Viggo Mortensen’s Tom Stall. Mortensen’s sympathetic
performance is so real and vivid that he makes you forget that king-dude he
played in the Lord Of The Rings films. His performance is matched by that of the
marvelous Maria Bello as his wife, Edie. Bello is one of the most underrated
actresses working in films today, and she’s remarkable here as Edie, a caring,
complex woman who’s caught up in events beyond her control and understanding. Ed
Harris creates another remarkable character in Fogarty, a one-eyed mobster
looking for vengeance, and William Hurt was understandably nominated for an
Oscar for his brief but memorable role as Ritchie, a Philly mob boss. It’s a
shame that the rest of the cast, as well as Cronenberg and the film itself,
never received any recognition from the Academy Awards voters.
The DVD has a
great, thoughtful commentary by Cronenberg, as well as several mini
documentaries that looks at the making of the film. There’s also a documentary
showing Cronenberg and his Violence cast at the Cannes Film festival, where they
receive a warm reception after a screening of the film. There’s also an in-depth
look at a deleted scene, a dream sequence involving Harris’ lethal killer, that
shows the making of the scene, as well as why it was cut from the film. In a
movie year where there had been much hyped-up controversies about which of the
five nominated films should have really won for Best Picture, the real crime is
that one of the truly great films of 2005 wasn’t even considered for the horse
race to begin with. --SF
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