There’s just one thing to tip you off about David Cronenberg’s new movie, A History of Violence. The gunshot wounds. In an otherwise straight-looking, straight-talking movie, they stand out like lush and evil-smelling exotic flowers. Now obviously, getting shot in the face can’t look pretty. But surely to God it doesn’t look like this. The ghastly contusions and lesions where the bullet goes in gibber like some extra rubbery mandible, or like the face of the alien as it emerges from John Hurt’s stomach. These cannot appear in any medical textbook known to man. It is as if the wounded person has been suddenly whisked at warp-speed to Planet Cronenberg to have the injury seeded with a kinky bacterium and then transported back to Earth for the resulting metastasis to be filmed.
Other than that, A History of Violence is all quite normal. Sort of. Cronenberg has directed an adaptation of a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke. It is a rather gripping and stylish film, a kind of black serio-comedy. A little middle-of-the-road for Cronenberg, maybe, but for him this has turned out to be the fast lane.
A History of Violence is about the intrusion of violent and bizarre outsiders in a peaceful, all-American small town whose inhabitants’ lives are drawn with surprising wit and sympathy. Viggo Mortensen plays Tom, a rugged, regular guy whose handsome features are always on the point of being shyly drawn upwards into a ”Shucks”. He runs a modest diner. Tom has a bright, nervy son, Jack (Ashton Holmes), who is being pushed around by a jock bully in school, a sweet pre-teen daughter and a wife, Edie (Maria Bello), who, after 15 years of marriage, still loves and desires him. One of the interesting achievements of this film is to argue for the intensity, even violence, possible in married love.
Everyone’s lives change when some itinerant bad guys roll into town and make the serious mistake of trying to stick up the local diner and, indeed, mess with the womenfolk. Tom, to his embarrassment, finds himself fêted by the national media as a hero, and also finds that his celebrity attracts the attention of some very scary individuals.
Cronenberg is not known for subtlety, and this is hardly a subtle film, but there is something intriguingly understated in the way he syncopates narrative and character. On paper it looks like a regular father-son drama, or a standard-issue gangster film, but there’s a Twilight Zone weirdness too. He gets an unreality effect, a note of superhero or secret-identity fantasy, that works particularly well when applied to Tom’s teenage boy.
The director saves his best flourish for the final act: a terrifically funny performance from William Hurt, whose habitual puzzled, quizzical, faintly nettled look has at last come into its own as a kind of murderous grumpiness.
Hurt’s presence provides the movie with an uproarious finale, which might not be enough to satisfy some people, inside and outside the director’s fan base, who will complain that Cronenberg has allowed himself to be washed into the commercial mainstream. This isn’t true. He has dammed and diverted the mainstream and made it work for him. — Â