Ray Pride

Dear reader, she slugged me.

David Cronenberg makes the kind of smart movies that make me stupid-happy, but all the explication in the world is not making every person I know happy after they've gone to "A History of Violence" on my recommendation. A few hours before typing this, in fact, I was both slugged and shoved and told just how stupid the movie was. "Hey, I didn't make the movie," is my usual reply, but in this case, it seemed diplomatic to run away for just a little bit.

Superficially a Western, Cronenberg's accomplished, lustrous film, is about Tom Stall, the proprietor of a diner (Viggo Mortensen) who must protect his family after a shootout in his Indiana small town causes Philadelphia mobsters to come looking for him, intent that he's a man out of their past, one who had an unpaid debt. Mortensen and Maria Bello, who plays his wife, are tremulously alive in every scene. Cronenberg toys with storytelling conventions, notions and clichés drawn from noir, pulp novels (and a graphic novel, which he says he did not know of before he read the script). Cronenberg offers both the visceral satisfactions of filmed violence and a critique of it, a cool Darwinian game that shifts gears several times in a split second. There's a tremendously smart set of scenes about how power can shift in sexual relations in a committed relationship, and the sex, like the violence, are taut, bravura studies in concision, geometry and suddenness.

And now I have a bruise.

I had the chance to interview Cronenberg last week after the movie's opening, but we got caught in a scheduling bind: a taping of "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross at Navy Pier had run long, traffic was bad, the pillows on the hotel couch didn't offer any lumbar support, and he had a 3:30pm live radio interview that couldn't be flipped. It was good to run a couple of observations past the 62-year-old director, looking his age but fit and content, but there was no way to get a conversation into fourteen minutes after he'd had the luxury of long, loping replies to questions in Ms. Gross' salon.

But it felt good just to offer a few descriptive affirmations, especially as I'd read a dozen earlier interviews since its Cannes debut and Toronto showing, each one as fresh, wry and witty as the other. But I'd also read a couple of reviews where writers have used the movie as a cudgel to muss the hair of a straw man called "intellectual filmmaking," but my favorite came from Daniel Neman, a writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch, who was irritated to the max by the tasty minimalism. Neman reviews Cronenberg's sleek stunner as "a cheap movie, cheaply filmed and cheaply made. And the editing leaves a lot to be desired, too... David Cronenberg ought to know better, but it is clear that he is working with too little money and too little script." Or, as my acquaintance put it, "Nothing happens! It's all obvious! It's clichés! What were you on?"

Cronenberg's scripts are notoriously short. He told me that the "Crash" pages ran only to a total of fifty-five or so, and perhaps sixty-six for the 97-minute "History." They're master classes in how quickly you can convey information, and there's a quiet smile on Cronenberg's face as he recalls the numbers. Back to my straw man: "The problem with the story is clear when we consider all the filler used just to stretch the movie to an hour and a half," the Virginian writes. "Cronenberg does not help matters by shooting the film so deadpan, so quietly, that it seems slow and uninteresting. The calm is punctuated by occasional bursts of violence and the disgusting special effects that follow them, but they don't help... It is obvious where Cronenberg's interest picks up, though it is only in a few places... He clearly revels in the scenes of blood and gore, though each one looks rather like the others... What doesn't interest him or the writer is the ending. The [ending] feels like it was written by a committee that jettisoned logic and character motivation just for the sake of ending. The filmmakers want it to end, so it ends."

And so it goes. For the record, Cronenberg has told interviewers, including your correspondent, that the final scene was one of his key demands to New Line, which readily acceded to his choice. I've seen "A History of Violence" three times, and it was still a thrill down to the smallest bit--Howard Shore's dour, Copland-esque score offers another layer of beauty and deliberation, and William Hurt has a small role that is almost indescribably louche and lovely. Here is one iconic, ironic image: convinced that his family is about to be ambushed at their farmhouse, he must rush to save the day once more. He calls his wife on his cell phone, and on bandaged foot, he run-hobbles across several beautifully composed frames, including one where his head rises above the horizon of a highway lined by autumn yellow and orange and grey trees: Gary Cooper without a horse. Cronenberg grins, "Is that Monty Python or what?"

"A History of Violence" is now playing.

(2005-10-04)

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