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'A History of Violence' leaves the audience to sort it out

The films of David Cronenberg are famed for their prodigious splat-factor, their psychological chills, visceral spills. Rubbery, slurpy gore is a frequent visitor in the director's coolly studied angst-scapes, yet it arrives in clinical, modulated spurts — the detonating head in "Scanners," Jeff Goldblum's slowly disintegrating insect-man in "The Fly," or the spasms of mano-a-mano violence in his latest, "A History of Violence."

Like most of Cronenberg's films, from the underappreciated "Dead Zone" to the deviant "Crash" (1996), the new drama radiates a becalming elegance that veils a simmering, low-frequency anxiety. That tremulous undercurrent is always set to flutter alive and shock.

New Line Cinema 'A History of Violence' 3 out of 5 stars Director: David Cronenberg Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Ashton Holmes Run time: 96 minutes Release date: September 23, 2005 Rating: R for strong brutal violence, graphic sexuality, nudity, language and some drug use. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'A History of Violence'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

There are several instances in "Violence" when Cronenberg takes glee in smashing the pastoral veneer he and his longtime cinematographer Peter Suschitzky have so delicately erected. For thematic purposes (and, one imagines, for bald horror kicks), the director is impelled to show the effects of violence. Glimpses here of meat and broken cartilage are vintage Cronenberg, and blechy as heck.

Though the film wants to set us at ease with its setting — a golden Midwest blah dappled with cornfields, brick churches and pickup trucks — it isn't after a false sense of security. After all, it opens with two thugs and pools of blood.

When the killers pull up to Tom Stall's old-fangled diner, they're asking for more than a 50-cent cup of coffee and a slice of pie. They want to rob the place in the meanest way they know how, propelling Stall (Viggo Mortensen) into a fell swoop of balletic, John Wooian action. Blam, blam, bye-bye.

Stall's heroic deed catapults him into the rabid media mythology, making him a local hero and punching a hole through his carefully cultivated Rockwellian life, the heart of which is a spiffy farm house, a lovely wife (a take-charge Maria Bello) and a pair of well-adjusted children. (This almost storybook family situation encourages a few too many stock scenes of improbable domestic amity, including some overly creative conjugal sex that had a preview audience hooting.) The mantle of heroism is the last thing this modest man, who doesn't even cuss, wants.

But his unease, and ours, thickens upon the arrival of Irish gangsters from Philadelphia who read about Stall's snap of violent self-defense. They insist Stall isn't who he says, but actually a mob figure with a history of violence, and they have come to bring him back.

"Ask him why he's so good at killing people," says the leader of the gangsters, played with a whiff of cartoonish malignancy by Ed Harris, whose left cheek is a ravaged sunburst of puckered flesh, a wound he claims Stall inflicted. (Better than Harris is William Hurt, who cuts a colorful, witty mobster in his most engaging performance in eons.) Harris becomes a pestering threat to Stall and his family, not unlike Max Cady in "Cape Fear," but Cronenberg commands such a steady, almost flat timbre that you can't anticipate where things might go.

Instead, Cronenberg invites a cool air of mystery — is Stall really someone else? — that he stirs into the story's uneasy alloy of rustic wholesomeness and rural menace. His tonal control, aided by pared-back visuals, is impressive and clears the way to tell what is in essence a parable. It goes beyond a meditation on violence begetting violence, but explores deception, the inescapability of the past, animals' native violence and the essential duality of humans (which Cronenberg also explored in "Dead Ringers"). When Stall's nerdy teenage son throws punches and picks up a shotgun, there are things to think about, including such thorny questions as: When is violence justified?

It's odd to say that the bloody paroxysms in "A History of Violence" make it a better movie, but they do. The film otherwise would be a temperate cipher, a sketchy character study with vague purpose. Cronenberg and screenwriter Josh Olson (who adapted the movie from a graphic novel) shock us to attention. Then, in the end, they walk away with a not-quite resolved parting shot, leaving it to us to sort it out.