David Cronenberg stirs up danger in 'A History of Violence'

September 23, 2005|Globe Staff

For more than 25 years, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has been making movies about man's fatal attraction to the extreme -- be it electronic (''Videodrome"), scientific (''The Fly"), medical (''Dead Ringers"), transgender (''M. Butterfly"), narcotic (''Naked Lunch"), erotic (''Crash"), virtual (''eXistenZ"), or psychological (''Spider"). His latest movie, ''A History of Violence," is something of a change-up. A mild-mannered, small-town fellow is accused of having gone to grisly extremes in the past.

The film has the perverse intelligence of Cronenberg's other movies. It's not his best, but it is certainly his most accessible, least stagy work, obeying the laws of chronology and serving up characters whom we recognize as people. The movie's brilliance resides in its use of cinematic convention to shatter an illusion of social normalcy.

The Stalls, whose home is perched on a handsome plot of land in Millbrook, Ind., are an average Middle-American clan, untroubled and happy. The adults, Tom (Viggo Mortensen) and Edie (Maria Bello), are still wildly attracted to each other, and the teenage son, Jack (Ashton Holmes), gets along great with Mom and Dad despite his pot smoking and woes at school.

The family's placid state is broken after two men show up at the diner Tom owns, just as it's about to close for the night. They try to rob the place, but in a nimbly choreographed sequence, Tom turns from his neighborly self into an efficient defenseman, killing his assailants and becoming a celebrity in the process.

But the heroic glow brings out the strangest things in the Stalls. Jack, for one, doesn't merely stand up to the school bully the day after his father's incident, he bludgeons him. The sweet kid turns into a rebellious teen who would put a scare into any punk on the WB.

Soon an unwanted visitor, played with hammy malice by Ed Harris dressed in a black suit, slithers out of the woodwork and into the diner. He insinuates that our hero is actually someone named Joey. Tom is baffled. Edie is outraged. And ''A History of Violence" starts looking like a noirish action movie reframed within the contours of a Western.

This is a hard film to be more detailed about because Cronenberg has so richly booby-trapped his question of whether Tom is or was a killing machine. Needless to say, Harris's character and his impossible accusation spark a note of disharmony in the Stall household that had probably been roiling just beneath the surface all along.