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A History Of Violence Director: David Cronenberg Rating: MA Now showing 
Like Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg will never be able to entirely leave his low-budget horror roots behind (at least, not while jerks like myself cite 'Videodrome', 'Dead Ringers' and 'The Fly' in their reviews, as I just have). It's not that his non-shockingly-visceral work is any less powerful or artful than his more shocking moments ('Spider' is one hundred times the film that 'eXistenz' is, for example) but that he does those sort of gory, slimy, set pieces so damned well (hence 'eXistenz' is also one hundred times more memorable than 'Spider').
So now we have the hugely acclaimed 'A History Of Violence', which is based on the graphic novel of the same name, but despite the title and the source material, is a good deal less, (ahem) graphic than one might expect. Viggo Mortensen plays Tom Stall, a pleasant enough chap who runs a cafe in a small Midwestern US town, liked in his community, loved by his children and still able to have hot, dirty sex with his wife Edie (Maria Bello). His life is thrown into disarray when two killers stop by his cafe to carry out a robbery with some senseless murder thrown in and the unarmed Tom manages to kill them both with little more than a coffee pot. The resulting national media attention about the local hero who defeated big city thugs draws the attention of a mysterious crime boss Carl Fogerty (Ed Harris), who is convinced that this Tom Stall is in fact Joey Cusack, a mob killer who half-blinded him decades back, and Fogerty has 20 years of pent-up revenge to exact - except he's got the wrong man. Or has he? I could fill the rest of the review with praise for the principal actors (with special mention of John Hurt's turn as a fellow crime boss), the hotness of the first Tom/Edie coupling or the powerful, wordless final scene, but here's the thing: 'A History Of Violence' is one of those films where all the performances are flawless, the shots are gorgeous, the composition excellent... but it somehow adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The first half is an exercise in mounting tension, but once Tom leaves his family to sort things out once and for all, it feels like an entirely different film welded onto the back end of the first one. Also, having loved the comic, I was waiting for its entirely different shocking climax (which, given the films mentioned in the first paragraph, Cronenberg would be uniquely suited to do). I mean, I'm nitpicking here: it's still one of the finest films in cinemas at the moment and it raises some difficult questions for the viewer about the nature of violence (and not the ones you'd expect by a facile reading of this review), but for me it lacked that spark that turns a well-made film into a classic. Go see it and we'll discuss it later. Perhaps over coffee.  |
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