A History of Violence (2005)

Short: Small town diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) defends his diner in a robbery and ends up a minor celebrity, to the equal delight and chagrin of his family (wife Maria Bello, son Ashton Holmes, daughter Heidi Hayes). His act attracts the attention of a mob family, who send in Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), convinced that Tom is one of their own.

Can I tell you that when this movie first came out, I didn't get the title at all? Even though I now realize that it means a history of violence in the sense that a person has been violent in his or her past, at the time I got all A Brief History of Time on it, thinking that the movie was going to cleverly show me how violence develops in a person's life over time. That's not what happens here, but I still think that would be an interesting watch.

As with all of director David Cronenberg's work, the movie concentrates on the nexus of sex and violence, bookended by two very different sex scenes between Mortensen and Bello. I appreciate the way the sex was not only integrated into but also integral to understanding the character development.* Unlike, say, Cronenberg's Crash, a movie both senseless and plot-less, which seemed to be a collection of sex scenes and car crashes strung together with no rhyme or reason.**

*Actually, come to think of it, I feel like it's been a long time since I saw a movie with a completely gratuitous sex scene. Either I've just stopped watching that kind of movie (erm, action movies of the 80s and 90s?), or they've finally gone the way of the dodo. Oh! 300! Wait, that was more gratuitously nude and graphic than it was plain gratuitous. Aw, crap. Um, Planet Terror? Okay, now I feel like I am going to miss the completely gratuitous sex scene.

**No, no, I know that's what the movie was about. I'm asking, "Why?"

I've done Crash, I've done Cronenberg's Oedipal Spider, and now I've done Violence. I've picked up bits and pieces of eXistenZ, and I am still working my way up to Dead Ringers. And here's the thing: I don't get Cronenberg. Either that or I just don't like him. On a personal level, I don't particularly care about the relationship between sex and violence, but I'd like to think that if his films were more relatable, then I would care for at least as long as the running time. I hear that I would like him or at least understand his movies better if I saw some of Cronenberg's earlier works, like Videodrone or Scanners, but nothing in what I have seen makes me want to put in the effort.

I did like Mortensen, as well as Bello, and particularly Mortensen and Bello together. They create a lived-in intimacy that actually feels intimate, unlike the sniping that so often passes for intimacy in movies and on television today. Bello makes everything Edie goes through as she comes to terms with who her husband really is (spoiler!) painful and believable, and it can be shattering to watch.

But I already knew that Tom would turn out to be Joey, and, watching the movie, there was never a real possibility that it would turn out any other way. Josh Olson, who adapted the graphic novel for the screen, did a great job of pacing the way Joey managed to creep back into Tom's life after he had worked so hard to keep Joey down, but somehow it didn't lend the movie the dramatic tension it needed. If anything, it was the final scene at the dinner table that contained the movie's most tense moment.

If you can't manage to wring a little tension out of a secret identity and fratricide, what does that say? B