A History of Violence
Director: David Cronenberg. Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ashton Holmes, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Peter MacNeill, Heidi
Hayes, Stephen McHattie, Greg Bryk, Gerry Quigley, Deborah Drakeford, Kyle Schmid. Screenplay: Josh Olson (based on the graphic
novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke).
We know that David Cronenberg is a master of the prologue. The utter, parentless solemnity of the Mantle twins in the opening
sequence of his masterpiece, Dead Ringers, lays the tonal and psychological groundwork for
everything that follows in that hermetic, horrific, but almost unbearably plaintive chamber drama. From the instant Deborah
Kara Unger rubs her breasts against the cool steel of an airplane hull in the earliest moments of Crash,
not just the perversities but the impossibilities of desire in that film are silently, shiveringly articulated. So it is no
surprise that A History of Violence already has its fists clenched and its stomach knotted from its funereal beginning,
as two scowling heavies check out of a dingy roadside hotel, killing the desk clerk, a maid, and a small girl in the process.
The carnage, though relegated just out of the frame or else delivered as a fait accompli of devastated babies, is mightily
unsettling: not the familiar human wreckage of mob stories and gun dramas, somehow, but a more mournful, more palpable image
of ended lives.
The perpetrators drive out of this slow sequence, governed by a tracking shot so sluggish that the camera seems practically
clenched with dread. By the time these peripheral characters return to the narrative, at an oblique and unexpected angle in
a traffic altercation, the film has already moved on to literally greener pastures, to a wider social canvas, and to a surprisingly
rangy tone. By then, we have borne witness to light comedy, kitchen-table conversation, frisky sexuality, locker-room bullying,
and the beginning brush-strokes of one of those intimate portraits of a marriage that are so often the stock in trade of
Hollywood dramas. In this case, subtle cues of wardrobe and behavior and less subtle indices like who drives the car and
who chats up the kids have telegraphed that Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is the quieter, recessive half of the couple he forms
with Edie Stall (Maria Bello), a lawyer to her husband's diner owner, who strikes us as a quicker thinker and a surer speaker.
The visual iconography of their small Indiana town, full of baseball diamonds, swept sidewalks, and square meals, as well as
the sonic underlacing of Howard Shore's minor-key fanfares keep pushing A History of Violence in the direction of
allegory, no doubt destined to orbit around the predatory appearance of those roving killers. Because Cronenberg is no kind
of sentimentalist or cultural apologist, and because he and his brilliant cinematographer Peter Suschitzky are already so
alert to the distant fire in the actors' faces, we know from the outset that we will come to learn something new about this
town, this family. The knowledge is bound to be terrible, and the camera, for better or worse, will be there to catch it.
Grade: B+
- Academy Award Nominations:
- Best Supporting Actor: William Hurt
- Best Adapted Screenplay: Josh Olson
- Golden Globe Nominations:
- Best Picture (Drama)
- Best Actress (Drama): Maria Bello
- Other Awards:
- New York Film Critics Circle—Best Supporting Actress: Maria Bello; Best Supporting Actor: William Hurt
- Los Angeles Film Critics Association—Best Supporting Actor: William Hurt
- National Society of Film Critics—Best Director: David Cronenberg; Best Supporting Actor: Ed Harris
- National Board of Review—Billy Wilder Award for Excellence in Directing: David Cronenberg