10-03-05, 8:43 am

A History of Violence Directed by David Cronenberg


David Cronenberg's classy new film moves the director back into the mainstream to present a critical commentary of a cinematic history that has been largely determined by Hollywood's version of the American Dream.

It's classy, because, from its opening shots of a couple of crooks departing a seedy motel, it maintains a measured pace throughout, with some stylish cinematography and a superb cast of characters.

Small-town diner proprietor Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), his attorney wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two offspring appear to be living the ideal American Dream until two gunmen wander into town.

Suddenly, the image of small town respectability and social cohesion is smashed asunder, resulting in questions being asked as to Stall's real identity after a one-eyed Ed Harris turns up looking for revenge.

Mortensen is magnificent, sliding between stoicism and savagery with a passion matched only by Bello as his incredibly strong and sexy spouse who simply isn't into simpering.

Like Shane in the Western, Stall has a gunslinger's past. But, whereas Shane was called upon to protect a couple of homesteaders from a land baron, Stall is forced out of retirement to protect his new family.

So the genre changes, the urban gangster being confronted with his violent past while dealing with the problems of heroism and the inevitable rifts in his marriage while he searches for his social soul.

The degree of suffering throughout appears to take on its own momentum as Cronenberg crashes through the genres as if he's determined to caricature himself as well as his cinematic contemporaries.

It's not so much that Cronenberg indulges in gratuitous gore, since everything seems to be designed to take us through the pain barrier as surely as a bullet crashes through the brain.

Loosely based upon the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, this is not a celebration of comic cruelty in the Tarantino mould - Cronenberg isn't interested in gore as artifice.

Nor is Cronenberg interested in choreographing action for action's sake, like so many Hollywood others, since it would stunt its ideological potency by inuring the audience to the value of the shock tactic.

The opening shots are sheer genius, Cronenberg emphasising the cool characteristics of his protagonists before ruthlessly savaging them as they display the sort of cruelty common to sociopaths.

The town is almost Western in its basic simplicity, the diner like the bar in Shane seemingly the only sign of commercial life, with all the modern appurtenances of the mall mentality expunged from view.

It serves to emphaise that there are parts of middle America that appear almost mythological, the local policeman expressing solidarity with 'one of their own,' until it becomes obvious that he's out of his depth.

Thus the necessity for the action to change terrain, the trip to the city signifying the ideological difference between homespun US and what appears to be a metropolis run by the mob.

As we can see with the current US crusade to extend its manifest destiny throughout the world, the ideals of the founding fathers are being confounded on the rocks of imperial reason.

Cronenberg seems to be saying that we are not free from the past, that it comes calling when you least expect it, never mind possibly taking out the cherished innocents who get in the line of fire.

On the other hand, he contradicts this with an image of a man driven to resort to basic instincts to protect that which he loves, but not without cost and not without losing some self respect.

After settling scores with his history, represented by his brother, who is played by William Hurt at his most creepiest, he also has to attend to returning home and answering to the family.

It closes with a scene that suggests a happy-ever-after scenario, only to slow it down as the tension between him as returning hero and absent father is made even more palpable by the action of one of his children.

From Morning Star