This evening I saw A History of Violence. What a disturbing and violent (surprise, eh? you wouldn’t have guessed it from the title) movie. I had no intention of seeing it, but then I read yesterday that it won the Village Voice’s seventh annual film critics’ poll, so I decided to check it out. I read some reviews afterwards, and I didn’t really catch on my own the meta/subversive/humorous element that some reviewers have apparently seen in it – although now that I think about it, I did find myself laughing in admiration at some of the shocking violence. It’s a provocative film and worth seeing, and it has a devastating, heartbreaking final shot. Viggo Mortensen is mesmerizing.
The Tin Man
It’s really quite good. Are you familiar with Cronenberg’s other films? He started out in low-budget horror movies with people being taken over virus-liek creatures (The Came From Within, Rabid) and then moved on to elaborate physical transformation (The Fly, Scanners, Videodrome).
He entered art house cinema via his adaptation of Naked Lunch (which I very much dislike) and moved on to such outre items as M. Butterfly and (to my mind his best film) Crash (an adaptation of J.G.Ballard’s novel about people for whom automobile accidents are sexual fetishes — not to be confused with the meretricious film of the same name released this past year) and Spider ( a study of schizophrenia from the inside.)
In some ways A History of Violence is just like his horror films. Only the hero becomes a monster on the inside rather than the outside.
Cronenberg was in town recently and I had a chance to chat with him about the film. He says the two aspects of his hero’s personality are always present — like Kim Novak’s Judy/Madeline in Hitchcock’s Vertigo