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'A History of Violence': Intimate insights into violence

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

When little Sarah Stall (Heidi Hayes) wakes up screaming from a nightmare, her mother, father and big brother all crowd around her bed, showing her there aren't any monsters in her room. Of course there aren't: They're still on the road, driving toward tiny Millbrook, Ind., about to change this family's lives forever.

New Line Cinema

'A History of Violence'

A-

The verdict: A lean, clean meditation on violence in America, and one of Cronenberg's best films.

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.
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Directed by Canadian creep-master David Cronenberg ("The Fly," "Dead Ringers"), "A History of Violence" sets up idealized, Norman Rockwell-ish images of family, then knocks them down. It makes us question our bedrock ideas about home, hearth and the true identity of people we believe we know better than anyone else. More than that, it's a cool-eyed dissection of violence itself — both as a real-life cultural blight and as an entertainment commodity used to sell Quentin Tarantino movies and Xbox games.

The movie begins with a masterful, uninflected tracking shot of two men checking out of a fleabag motel — and leaving no one there alive. The duo arrive in downtown Millbrook at night and promptly try to hold up a mom-and-pop diner. But its owner, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), surprises the crooks — and everyone else — by fighting back and becoming a hero.

That's when trouble starts.

Soon Tom, wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two kids, including older son Jack (Ashton Holmes), find themselves shadowed by a black car carrying a sinister number named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) and two goons.

Carl says he's hunting a guy from the old days named Joey who worked with the mob in Philadelphia — and blinded Carl in one eye with barbed wire. Carl seems convinced Joey and Tom are the same man.

To say much more would dilute the film's power. Adapted for the screen by Josh Olson, "Violence" both streamlines and deepens John Wagner and Vince Locke's 1997 graphic novel. The script eliminates details from the original backstory, changing the identity (and gruesome fate) of a character called Richie while raising the emotional stakes. In particular, it expands upon the relationship at its core: Tom and Edie's marriage.

While the movie has a potboiler action plot, its crucial moments are intimate — especially two very different sexual encounters. Shot and acted with such matter-of-fact honesty and maturity, they remind you how badly most movies fumble sex scenes or turn them into a joke. It's a credit to the usually prudish MPAA that its members seemed to understand these scenes aren't gratuitous but carry the movie's emotional and thematic weight. Mortensen and Bello share a wordless scene on a stairway that's just brilliant, fusing sex with violence and letting the movie's ideas and contradictions smolder.

Like the best parts of "A History of Violence," the scene leaves you (and the characters) unsettled, unsure whether to be repulsed or turned on, to giggle or look away. Cronenberg keeps things expertly unbalanced like that throughout.

He's helped by a terrific Mortensen, who makes subtle, surprising acting choices. Like his family members, we don't know whether to fear for him, or just fear him, in a world that's suddenly turned upside down.

The people in this movie aren't bulletproof. After every violent act, we see its ugly, broken, life-altering result. (The movie, like many of Cronenberg's, isn't for the squeamish.) We also see how a single nasty encounter tends to set off a bad-karma chain of repercussions.

"History" is a model of clean, lean storytelling. In fact, a few Happy Small-town Americana clips featured in the film's trailer don't appear in the final cut. Cronenberg doesn't give us any more time to think about the plotline than Tom and his family do after their lives are whiplashed by a new reality.

Bello is Mortensen's match, delivering a performance that's sexy, motherly, soft and hard all at once. Harris makes a reliably sinister villain, while, more unexpectedly, William Hurt, in a small role, taps a deep reserve of creepiness.

"A History of Violence" finishes with tense, wordless scenes that feel less like an ending than the beginning of a whole 'nother movie — one that might be too painful to watch. It sends you out of the theater trying to imagine what happens next for this family. When so many movies arrive at the multiplex with all their loose ends wrapped up in synthetic bows, that's pretty rare. And really, really appreciated.