A History of Violence
Written by: Lance Carmichael, CC2K Staff Writer
1. The mystery of Viggo’s secret life is so damn compelling because we’re talking about Viggo here. Our personal, modern Jesus. He’s just so damned trust-worthy. You want to believe in his inherent goodness so badly. He plays his character, Tom, with all the Virtue Projection gifts he was born with and perfected playing Aragorn. Viggo just couldn’t be a man with a violent past! But then why is Ed Harris so sure of himself…?
2. Solid acting (except for the awful, I mean awful, child actor). Everyone over the age of seven acquits themselves admirably in this movie, anchoring what should be a piece of pretentious cheese and making you believe the story despite yourself (just another example of the heavy-handedness of this movie: every villain who comes into Viggo’s diner orders coffee. Black coffee. They’re way too badass for cream or sugar. They probably don’t even wait for it to cool before they drink it.). To be singled out for distinction are Viggo, who single-handedly carries the movie through its clumsiest sections; Ed Harris, who can do Terrifying Creepy Guy in his sleep; and William Hurt, in a role I can’t talk about without giving away all the plot’s secrets. Hurt’s short, scene-chewing role has Best Supporting Actor nomination stamped all over it.
3. This movie is long stretches of mundaneity and corny, rural-Americans-are-virtuous asininity, interrupted by sudden staccato bursts of EXPLICITNESS. Viggo and his wife share a sweet, safely naughty love scene where she dresses up as a cheerleader for him before sex. It’s mildly funny, but then goes on WAY too long as they confirm each other’s undying love for one another again and again and again. Then they start to get into it. Viggo starts kissing her all over…until suddenly we realize that we’re watching Viggo Mortensen perform analingus on his wife of many years (Arwen should have been so lucky). Cronenberg doesn’t cut away immediately, either. He lets us stew in our own juices wondering what the hell this all means and how it got by the ratings board.
The violence is incredibly graphic as well. Viggo is basically a ninja-in-hiding. He plays a hand-to-hand fighter who could hold his own against any Steven Seagal or Jean Claude Van Damme’s characters, no problem. He goes through every cool hand-to-hand move in the book: breaking a guy’s arm over his shoulder, kicking someone in the balls, driving a man’s nose cartilage up into his brain, throwing hot coffee in someone’s face; grounding his heel into someone’s throat; using someone as a human shield; and capping it all off with the best hand-to-hand finisher of all time — breaking someone’s neck with his bare hands. Plus there’s shotgun blasts to the abdomen, brainings, and a near-rape scene. All this happens during an other-wise slow-moving popular art movie, not Marked for Death. Very disconcerting and exhilarating juxtapositions.
The fact that he’s already made one decent movie after his breakout epic trilogy indicates that Viggo Mortensen should have no trouble avoiding a life as the next Mark Hamill. Viggo has the fairly rare ability to make you believe him no matter how impossible the character is (the ridiculously good, virtuous Aragorn), how bad the child actor he’s working with is, or how Hollywood-ishly false the setting he’s acting in. Viggo has real star quality, and bringing gravity to cheese is a skill that will serve him well in Hollywood. This means he may be able to live somewhere between the art-house and th multiplex, making very believable Dad-in-Troubles in crypto-action movies disguised in art’s clothing for a long time.