A History of Violence

Aragorn was puzzled by the man's oddly shaped sword.

Tom Stall is a doting father, a loving husband, and an all-round nice guy. Early one morning he arrives at the door of his small-town diner, where he stops and collects some litter from the pavement outside. This is a small detail, but a telling one. The point is that Tom, played by Viggo Mortenson, is an ordinary guy doing ordinary-guy things – like running a business and picking up after litterbugs.

But when two killers, whose irredeemable badness is established in the opening sequence, hold up the diner, Tom’s world is upended. To save the life of an employee, Tom kills both would-be robbers. In doing so, he displays astonishing reflexes and skill with a gun. Overnight, Tom becomes an all-American hero – his face beamed across the country by breathless cable TV and printed in newspaper reports.

But this publicity has unexpected consequences. Shortly after the foiled robbery and the media storm that follows, three strangers show up at the diner. They’re mobsters from Philadelphia. Their leader, Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), insists that Tom’s real name is “Joey Cusack”, and that he has a score to settle with Joey. Tom’s wife, Edie (Maria Bello), overhears Fogarty’s conversation with her husband. At first she’s dismissive. But seeds of doubt are sown: who’s Joey Cusack, and how come Tom’s so good at killing people?

In the preamble to this menacing turn of events, Cronenburg hammers home the apple-pie perfection of the Stalls. In one portentous scene, Tom’s young daughter has a nightmare, and he comes into her bedroom and comforts her. Soon after, his teenage son, Jack, also enters, sits on the bed, and has comforting words for his sister. The family portrait is complete when Edie arrives to see what the fuss is about. They all end up sitting on the girl’s bed, telling her that the bad men she dreamt about aren’t real and can’t hurt her.

This is an important preliminary. Cronenburg contrasts the perfect family life of the Stalls with the brutality of the forces arrayed against them, and contrasts the man Tom apparently is with the man Fogarty insists he once was. This scene, the Stall family closing ranks to soothe the daughter, also counterpoints the film’s final scene. Unfortunately, the scene sucks donkey balls. It’s phony and too obviously emblematic. The characters’ actions – what they do, and how they do it – aren’t real. And as such, the viewer is pulled forcibly from the story.

The same can be said for the subplot involving the son, Jack. He’s facing typical teenage problems: he has low self-esteem and is hounded by the school bully. This whole subplot could be a compendium of scenes cut and pasted from any number of uninspired teen flicks. From the scene in which Jack responds to the bully’s antagonism with the sparkle of his repartee to the scene where, pushed to breaking point, he retaliates, this subplot’s as stale as week-old bread. It seems as if Cronenburg is so impatient to get to the crux of his story he’s only prepared to paint the preamble in the biggest, broadest brushstrokes. But this counts against the film as a whole. It doesn’t matter how compelling the film’s ideas are if it flubs all the details.

It’s a pity, because this film does grapple with important ideas. A History of Violence, like so many films I’ve seen over the last two years (The 25th Hour, Man on Fire, The Place Promised in Our Early Days...), is an examination, at one remove, of September 11. As its title suggests, the film is about the necessity, the cost, and the perpetuation of violence. When is violence justified? How much violence is justified? And how much harm can you do to preserve those you love without becoming the thing you’re trying to protect them from?

The film also suggests that the rule of law is far more tenuous than it seems. With very little prompting, naked brutality can erupt through the surface of everyday life. And, of course, once unleashed, violence can so easily lead to an endless and escalating cycle. But so what? We agree. Violence should only be a last resort; it can become self-perpetuating; it demands a sense of proportion. Yes, yes, and yes. But all this is punishingly obvious. What’s interesting is where you might take it. Frustratingly, this film, despite all the plaudits, takes it nowhere.

Perhaps I’m prejudiced by my high expectations – some critics rated this the best film of 2005 – but I expected more. A History of Violence disappoints on every level: patchily acted, poorly scripted and edited, and photographed with all the inspiration of a daytime soap. Sure, it raises interesting questions, but after setting the scene, the movie jettisons moral or characterly complexity for half-arsed thrillerdom.

And that’s a problem in more ways than one.

It’s a problem because it disregards the questions it’s gone to the trouble of raising. And it’s also a problem because the thrillerly twists it takes are so very, very lame. Many of its scenarios simply aren’t credible, and it never musters enough pace or interest to whizz the viewer, heedless, past these implausibilities. What it says is uninspired. So is how it says it.

Which brings me to William Hurt. What film was he acting in? He was nominated for an Academy Award for that? Fuck me. I’m not sure what region of his rectum he pulled that accent from, but it's embarrassing. Hurt playing a wiseguy is the most laughable piece of casting since Denise Richards played a nuclear physicist. He’s such a scenery-chewing atrocity that nothing he does, or has done to him, has any gravity whatsoever. Hurt’s performance is the worst, but it’s by no means the only bad one – the less said about the adolescent actors, the better. Even Maria Bello’s much-hyped performance is only OK. To be fair, the actors have a thankless task, hamstrung as they are by camerawork and editing that leeches immediacy from their performances.

As for the script, well... Characters routinely display emotions they haven’t earned. That’s why, so many scenarios seem fake, so many actions seem unmotivated, and so many plot twists recall many previously watched and quickly forgotten films – a category in which A History of Violence will eventually, once the hype has subsided, assume its rightful position

--Hans Fruck