Leave it to David Cronenberg to deconstruct the mythical American hero with odd wit and clinical detail. A History of Violence (2005) looks like a small-town melodrama on the surface, then peels back skin to expose identity, impulse, and the stories we tell to survive. Viggo Mortensen gives one of his sharpest performances as Tom Stall, a soft-spoken diner owner whose quick, efficient dispatching of two spree killers turns him into a local legend and blows up the quiet life he has built with Edie, played with fierce tenderness by Maria Bello.
The more the attention grows, the more Tom begins to look like someone else entirely, a man tied to a Philadelphia crime syndicate that will not forget him. Ed Harris arrives as a scarred emissary who swears he knows Tom by another name, and William Hurt turns up late with a sly, unnerving jolt that earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Cronenberg’s direction is often called simple here, but the simplicity is a feint. He drains away the showy body horror of Videodrome and Crash without losing the director’s fascination with flesh and impulse, then stages violence with bracing matter-of-factness. The diner shootout, the home invasion on the farm, the queasy intimacy of a marriage pushed to extremes, each scene is blocked and cut so cleanly that you feel the shock and the aftershocks. Howard Shore’s score murmurs with dread and Peter Suschitzky’s camera finds hard light in ordinary rooms, turning a cornfield, a linoleum floor, and a staircase into moral battlegrounds.
Mortensen downplays charisma until he cannot any longer, and watching that mask slip is the film’s central pleasure and its central horror. Maria Bello matches him beat for beat as Edie, a partner who believed in the picture of their life and refuses to be gaslit by a fantasy. Ed Harris brings sly menace to every line reading, and William Hurt lets a grin curdle into something predatory in minutes. It is no accident the Academy recognized this ensemble and Josh Olson’s screenplay, adapted from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, with nominations for Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.
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People sometimes tag A History of Violence as Cronenberg’s “straight” movie because it trades in gangsters and suburbs instead of mutant tech and surgical fetishes, yet it might be his most sophisticated act of genre play. The film is slippery and exact at once, a tight thriller that doubles as an x-ray of American self-mythology. Seen alongside Eastern Promises and Crimes of the Future, it underlines how well Cronenberg works with Viggo Mortensen, always pushing him toward the fault line where civility frays. Nearly twenty years on, this remains one of the director’s most purely gripping features and, for many, the Cronenberg that is easiest to rewatch without losing the uneasy questions that make it linger.
Score: 9/10
A History of Violence (2005)
- Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Ashton Holmes, Peter MacNeill, Stephen McHattie, Greg Bryk
- Director: David Cronenberg
- Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
- Runtime: 96 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: September 30, 2005
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