history of violence
I'm thinking of writing Karina, Ebert, and Roeper and asking for my money back on this one. It wasn't horrible or even necessarily a bad film, but it fell far short of the buzz and praise that had built up from the time it first started receiving reviews and my viewing of it last night. Perhaps the long litany of bad films over the summer months has fooled everyone else into thinking this movie to be starkly original. A History of Violence is a familiar story: a man with a dangerous past he thought he had successfully escaped has that past intrude on his current life through a bit of happenstance.



In his review, Roger Ebert notes, "So persuasive are the opening scenes that we wonder if Cronenberg has abandoned his own history of violence and decided to make a small-town slice of life: a Capra picture, perhaps, with Viggo Mortensen as Jimmy Stewart. Then all hell breaks loose." The first scenes, actually, are filled with hell: all tense violence, as we see our two original villains take out the entire staff of a hotel. Then one of them casually shoots a young girl. Ebert misses these scenes and skips ahead to the next set of scenes that begin when the bullet that would kill the little girl in the hotel is fired and we cut to the young daughter of the Stall family waking from a nightmare. I, for one, wasn't persuaded by the opening scenes. I found the young daughter to be unbelievable and the scene with the whole family coming in to comfort her middle of the night nightmare to be overly sentimental. The scene read as false to me as did many of the scenes in this movie that were supposed to pull me into identifying with these characters and caring about this family. TV's Walden family doesn't play well in a contemporary film on violence.

The parts that rang true were the violent bits, which were well filmed and performed. Ed Harris is amazing as Carl Fogerty, the glassy-eyed villain who comes to town to reveal Tom Stall to truly be a very violent man named Joey. But, unfortunately, his performance cannot carry this film and neither can any of the very well done violent scenes. The sentimentalism of the attempted family drama drain the violence of its power.

While tracing the Stall family's movement toward understanding the role of the violence that has intruded on their peaceful lives, our own Karina Longworth notes, "Slowly the Stalls realize that violence and its attendant aggression and adrenaline, the sweat and the bruises and most of all the blood is simply sexy." I don't read anything sexy in the violence of this film. I don't think Tom Stall does either, as he has spent years trying to kill off his former violent self, Joey. Karina has forgotten the earlier sex scene, just as Ebert forgot the violent intro scene. Before any of the violence began intruding in their lives, Mr. and Mrs. Stall have a very graphic sex scene complete with cheerleading and the most bizarre move into sixty-nine that I've ever seen on film.

I'm not faulting Karina or Ebert for forgetting these scenes in their reviews; I'm faulting the film. It's pace is slow at times, and scenes are easily forgettable, with the exception of those featuring Ed Harris and the best set of scenes in the film: those featuring William Hurt, as Joey's mobster brother Richie who has tracked down his brother and brought him back to Philadelphia for business and revenge.

Roeper concludes his somewhat simplistic review by noting "A History of Violence plays like a classic western updated for modern times. Its one of the most provocative and intense movies of the year. See it." Here, I think is where everyone is being fooled by this movie. It is filled with some very provocative film, especially in comparison to this year's fare. However, A History of Violence is not a full film and it is not a great film when you hold it up against the backdrop of films from other years.