A History of Violence
Written by: Lance Carmichael, CC2K Staff Writer
Let’s start with the very first thing you notice about the movie — the striking title. It’s a bold, memorable choice. I remember the first time I heard any mention of it was a film poster sitting in a theater lobby. A History of Violence: so damn sweeping and ballsy. Beyond the suggestion that someone in the movie has “A History of Violence,” the title implies that this is a film that’s going get beyond the normal pulpy, thrill-inducing use of violence movies normally traffic in and get at something deeper, to examine the true cost and nature of violence on an elemental level. To create some kind of cinematic taxonomy of violence — something like Straw Dogs. Seeing David “Art House” Cronenberg’s name attached to that title, plus the elegant, primal simplicity of the poster design suggested all this to me. Maybe I shouldn’t hold the associations the film’s title and poster caused in my head against them film, but what the hell? If you call your movie The Absolutely Best, Most Provocative Movie Ever Made sans-irony, you better be ready to live up to some big expectations.
Let me save you the time: This is not Straw Dogs.
A History of Violence is a good movie — worth your money, at least. But it is by no means great. There’s enough tension and, yes, violence built into the story to make A History of Violence a fascinating, if frustrating, movie. But Straw Dogs is a movie which, if you’ve seen it, will stick with you for the rest of your life. It’s a slow-boiling Sam Peckimpah film from the 70s in which nebbishy mathematician Dustin Hoffman must find the capacity to commit violence within himself to save his family. It’s subtle, it’s slow-building but relentless, and it does not swerve from the abyss the story is pointed straight at from the very beginning. Every fear a woman has when she walks by a group of teenage guys lurking about…every doubt a husband’s ever had…It’s a movie that, when put side by side with almost anything else, will blow it away.
The main problem with A History of Violence is that it’s a film full of big, broad choices, when subtler approaches would have worked much better, as they did in Straw Dogs, a quiet movie where small details build and build to the cathartic-yet-still-unpleasant exploding point. It’s difficult to say who should take the blame for this. The script and graphic novel A History of Violence is based on certainly have a killer story engine, but it resorts to stock characters and locations to execute it, and director David Cronenberg doesn’t have the tools in his directorial bag of tricks to make them work. Cronenberg usually works with provocative, bold material — the perverse sexuality of Videodrome, Crash, and his most successful bizarro-fest, Dead Ringers, among many, many others. He’s not the kind of director who can ring bells of recognition in your head through smartly-observed moments of everyday life. He needs evil gynecologists and wound-fuckers to really get his work singing. A History of Violence mostly takes place in a small Indiana town, and Cronenberg stuffs it full of false notes.
Viggo plays Tom Stall, a married man living in a Norman Rockwell painting. After he ends up on the news by killing two armed robbers at his diner, he attracts the very shady Ed Harris to his town, who believes Viggo is someone other than he claims. Viggo can channel “decent” about as well as anyone since Jimmy Stewart*, and he works like hell to make the false-feeling utopia of rural Indiana feel more realistic. But even Jimmy Stewart couldn’t rescue the first scene of Viggo and his family. It takes place at night, as his five-year old daughter (played by an absolutely dreadful child actor) wakes up from a dream, screaming. Viggo rushes in to see what’s the matter. She just had a dream about “monsters.” Viggo reassures her that monsters aren’t real and that he can protect her.
* Can we pause for one second and imagine a Lord of the Rings production directed in 1955 by Cecil B. Demille, starring Jimmy Stewart as Aragorn? How great would that be? I hope CGI advances enough in the next fifty years that I can make this movie starring my Dream Team cast on my laptop: Charlton Heston as Gandalf, Andy Warhol as Saruman, Leonard Nimoy as Elrond, Adam West as Theoden, Shaquille O’Neal as Eomer, Dennis Hopper as Denethor, William Shatner as Gimli, Clarke Gable as Boromir, an 80-year old Katherine Hepburne as Arwen, Burt Ward as Frodo, and Sean Astin as Sam — you’re telling me you wouldn’t want to watch this?
This left us viewers scratching our chins. Hmm…I wonder why they’re showing this scene? I mean, kids have scary dreams about monsters all the time, right? What does that possibly have to do, thematically, with the rest of the story, which centers around a bunch of bad guys who start threatening Viggo and his family? I wonder if I’ll look back at this scene at the end and recall with a sudden burst of insight how ingeniously the writers foreshadowed the events of the rest of the movie with this first scene? And it seemed so innocent at the time!
Any self-respecting writer capable of coming up with a plot machine as relentless as the one in A History of Violence should have been savvy enough to recognize the heavy-handedness of this ninth-grade metaphorical scene and deleted it. And any director as artistically respected as Cronenberg should have cut it even before shooting it. But Cronenberg not only plays this scene perfectly straight, but guess what happens next? Viggo’s seventeen-year old son immediately pops his head in the door and asks, “What’s wrong?” “Sarah had a bad dream.” Then the son — right on the heels of the father's pronouncement that monsters are not real — starts pretending like monsters are real: "Oh, shadow monsters?" he says. "They're not that scary, and they're afraid of the light" Even this insignificant moment feels like a dropped ball to me. The son is clearly sending the daughter a mixed message; why didn't Viggo's all-wise father correct him?
Then Viggo’s wife pops her head in the door. The exact same scene is repeated. She comes in, sits down, and denies the existence of monsters. Not only is all this redundancy boring, it rings patently false. Since when does a nightmare constitute a family crisis? I don’t remember any earnest family debates on Little Sis’s bed about the ontology of monsters — particularly when I was a surly seventeen-year old — and I bet I’m not exactly the exception to the rule.
The movie manages to stay compelling despite the clunkers bombarding the audience every couple of scenes, but not for lack of trying. A History of Violence gropes clumsily with the mechanics of story structure and believable moments like a freshmen fumbling with a coed’s pesky bra strap. More examples:
• Viggo’s harassment by bad guys is paralleled by a High School Bully torturing Viggo’s son in a bully subplot straight out of Leave it to Beaver. The bully is pure preppy evil driving a huge pickup truck, and Viggo’s son acts exactly like Viggo does in …hey, Viggo’s in a similar situation, too! How ‘bout that!
• In a scene late in the movie, Viggo is being driven to a house that, unlike his, is fortified with security. Instead of allowing the more alert audience members to pick up the differences between these locations on their own and tip their hats to the director’s subtle use of location to convey the relative power of the characters — and the less alert to let this play subconsciously on the emotions the movie is engendering in them — the screenwriters/Cronenberg has Viggo make sure we don’t miss the fact that this house has a huge gate by saying, “Nice gate” to the driver. The movie just can’t underplay subtext to save its life. Not a mistake Sam Peckinpah would have made in a million years. It’s the little things that make a movie great.
• Plus there’s a horrible continuity problem towards the beginning of the picture that I wouldn’t feel right letting slide by. Viggo, who has recently been shot in the foot and doesn’t have a car, has reason to believe that Ed Harris and his goons are driving from his diner, located in town, to his house, which we are led to believe is miles out in the country. He calls his wife and tells her to get the shotgun, Ed Harris is coming. He does not tell her to get in the car with the kids and leave the house. He then starts running/ limping home….for what looks like miles. Viggo is shown running through different landscapes, all cross-cut with his wife frantically loading the shotgun. Cut to Viggo, turning down a country road. Cut to wife, dropping shells on floor in her panic. Cut to Viggo, limping through another meadow. Cut to wife, opening the front door fearfully. Cut to Viggo, out-of-breath, walking in.
How fast did he run? How slowly did she load the shotgun? All that was missing from making this a Monty Python skit was Michael Palin dressed up as his wife or a shot of him running past the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. Sheesh.
The strange thing is that despite all this artlessness, the movie still works. After thinking this through, I think there’s three reasons why A History of Violence works so well, in spite of the writers’ and director’s many missteps. Here they are: