‘A History of Violence’

Powerful acting compensates for underwritten characters in this brutal tale of a small-town hero with a murky past.

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   A History of Violence is set in Millbrook, Ind., a fictional town where everyone seems to be on a first-name basis with everyone else. Like a ’50s Hollywood set, Millbrook seems just a little too postcard-perfect to be true. So does Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), the modestly manly owner of Millbrook’s cozy downtown diner.
   The father of a sensitive hunk of a teenage boy and an adorable little girl and the husband of the gorgeous and devoted Edie (Maria Bello), who calls him "the best man I’ve ever known," Tom appears to be a model citizen. But he turns out to be hiding secrets so deep they could swallow up his entire family.
   Trouble comes to Millbrook in the form of a pair of killers in need of cash. After performing a hit at a cheap hotel in the area, they set out to rob Tom’s diner. But when they decide to kill one of his employees midway through the robbery, Tom strikes back, killing both of them.
   That’s disturbing enough, but it’s just the beginning. The media coverage of Tom’s victory attracts an ice-cold character with a milky left eye to the diner. Flanked by two silent henchmen, Carl Fogaty (Ed Harris) insists that Tom is really Joey Cusack, a Philadelphia gangster who nearly blinded him more than a decade ago. When Edie reacts with righteous fury, Fogaty advises her to ask her husband some questions, starting with: "How come he’s so good at killing people?"
   To protect himself and his family from Fogaty and the man who sent him, Tom has to keep killing. And the more he kills, the more we — and his family — wonder who he really is.
   On some level, of course, it’s extremely satisfying to watch a hometown hero beat the bad guys at their own game. Director David Cronenberg doles out those thrills expertly, but he doesn’t let us wallow in them too long. He wants us to think about the consequences of our love affair with violence, and one of the ways he does that is by showing us the gory aftermath of every fight. After each killing, he flashes a brief but indelible shot of the aftermath: the mangled face of a man with half his jaw blown away and the other half still working; the bloody pieces of brain splattered across Tom’s shirt; the body of a murdered maid sprawled at the feet of her terrorized daughter.
   History is based on a graphic novel, and it shows. It’s nowhere near as stylized as Sin City, whose aim was to reproduce the look and feel of the book it was based on, frame for frame. Instead, History aims to make us think: about the things people hide from those that they’re intimate with, about whether a sinner can ever reinvent himself as a saint; about the difficulty of escaping from the violence we carry within us.
   Still, it retains the crude, muscle-car power of its source material. Every conflict and virtually every casual conversation echoes one of the story’s three themes, and the supporting characters are pretty thinly sketched.
   It’s clear that the violence the family is plunged into has a profound effect on Tom’s son Jack (Ashton Holmes), but the script offers few hints about just what he’s going through.
   Even Edie remains relatively opaque. Cronenberg, who specializes in sex scenes that are genuinely erotic but also have emotional resonance, uses two here — a tender one early on and a rough one later — to show the evolution of Edie’s relationship with Tom. Those scenes illustrate the strength of their connection, but as things get murkier, we’re left to guess what she’s thinking and whether she’ll stick with him.
   Powerful acting goes a long way toward compensating for underwritten characters. Mortensen gives Tom the exaggerated politeness of a man who’s spent years reining in strong emotions, whose feelings keep leaking through his carefully constructed façade. Bello’s Edie starts out wide open and then closes in around herself, everything from her posture to the light in her eyes shutting down as the story progresses. Harris and William Hurt, who appears in a vivid cameo toward the end, do a lot with a little screen time, dropping sparkling briquettes of black humor as they go. And Holmes, whose pale, fine-bone face seems incapable of hiding an emotion, makes Jack’s inarticulate angst touching.
   Unfortunately, Heidi Hayes, the little blond cutie who plays Tom and Edie’s daughter Sarah, is about as expressive as a Cabbage Patch doll, and since she carries the weight of the final scene, it falls a little wide of the mark.
   Less provocative than 1999’s eXistenZ and less moving than 2002’s Spider, A History of Violence isn’t Cronenberg’s best work. But it’s expertly paced, excellently acted, occasionally thought-provoking, and always engaging. And that adds up to a thoroughly satisfying night at the movies.
Rated R. Contains strong brutal violence, graphic sexuality, nudity, language and some drug use.