Second Chances: A History of Violence (page 3)

SECOND CHANCES

john cribbs

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

page 3

What does Cronenberg want to say? "I want to discuss the nature of violence and its consequences, how people are affected by violent occurrences." That's straight from the horse's mouth, a quote from Cronenberg when asked point blank what he was going for in the movie. But what are the consequences of violence? That it's messy? An extreme close-up of a blown-off jaw isn't pleasant to look at, but I doubt the director was talking about biological devastation. On the surface, the consequences of violence in A History of Violence is that bad people will come looking for you and threaten your family because the media attention surrounding your act has drawn attention to your past violence. Again this seems a little too obvious in terms of what Cronenberg really wants to "discuss." The violent occurrences depicted in the film don't really have consequences at all: three of the incidents are against murderers who are thereby dispatched forever, thus solving the main character's problems. None of Tom's attacks on these people lead to any sort of retaliatory action from further "monsters" and there's no question that they deserved what they got - maybe the nature of violence is that it's an easy and convenient way to get out of a jam.

Then again, characters in this movie who deserve or don't deserve to have violence visited upon them is a topic of subjectivity. Curly Jack, the eldest spawn of the Stall clan, literally fails to deliver a single line or facial expression that doesn't make me wish to see him horribly beaten. Ashton Holmes, a notably terrible actor who was 26 - eleven years Bello's junior - when the movie was made, is one element of the movie you'd think even positive reviews would single out as a problem, but no: staying true to form, admirers have showered his awful performance with nearly unanimous praise. Holmes' method in creating the character seems to have been to borrow the absolute worst qualities of a nerd, a brat, a handicapped individual and a cocksure loser, combine them and top it all off with a sprinkle of exaggerated feyness. The first time he's introduced, during that abhorrent post-nightmare sequence, he comes in to sit on the bed and console the little girl with dad prior to the mother's appearance, almost like he and Viggo are a gay couple. If his physical presence wasn't distracting enough (too old to be in high school, too fit to be the dork playing right field), his two ranges of expression, injured and confused, being played to excruciating levels of detestability make it impossible to sympathetize with the character in the slightest. One of the film's moments that could have worked - where he looks at his father "transformed" into another person and doesn't recognize him - is ruined by his mime-like overacting.

A character this unlikable deserves a Buddy Revell-level bully, but the film fails once again and plucks some pretty boy from the bully discount store (one who hasn't even been trained in karate by a sadistic ex-mercenary a'la Johnny Lawrence). The beginning of Tokyo Drift had a more convincing heavy, and that was the kid from "Home Improvement." Watching the movie a second time I was consciously trying to figure out whether the script is just literally so bad that the writer's idea of a movie bully is a physically unimposing Robert Pattison-type who pushes his victim against a locker while assaulting him with a series of uncreative name-calling strung together using random pieces of profanity, or if this was yet another attempt by the movie to sabotage its own cliche. It has to be the former, right? I mean this guy manages to intimidate a little goth chick by shouting "Shut up, skank!" at her. He and his toadie would be laughed out of the locker room of any real American school, or movie school, if he tried to use a phrase like that as a serious threat. But like the Stalls this person doesn't exist in the movie to be anything but a symbol: the world has bullies and the world has mass murderers. Get it - there are different levels of violence! The most unintentional laugh in a film filled with unintentional laughs arrives when this hunk/bully comes face to face with the hotel killers after a near-collision of vehicles and shrinks away from their cold glares. "Who were they?" his toadie asks as the silent intimidators drive off in their pick-up truck. Quivering pretty boy returns: "I don't know - and I don't want to know!"

At its Cannes premiere Cronenberg declared the movie "funny," and several positive reviews begin to point out some of the more ridiculous moments like this one before acquiescing that ok yeah, it is funny, we get it. But I don't understand what the director or the critics are referring to exactly. The bully stuff isn't amusing, it's just stupid. If the joke is that it's supposed to be stupid, then get the fuck out of my face. The word "funny" here seems to be another apologetic way of getting around the fact that a clearly intelligent filmmaker/storyteller is presenting these elements as if they weren't failed attempts to put some kind of detached/ironic spin on well-worn cliches. I mean jesus, do I really have to talk about the Ed Harris subplot at all? Everything about it is so hopelessly cheesy, right down to his mutilated "monster" face (the daughter has bad dreams about monsters yet doesn't react in the slightest when Milky White Cyclops is sitting close to her at the mall?) He greases his prey up with hilarious lines like "You see how cozy it can be when you decide to play nice?" This is the kind of dialogue they got in this movie! From 2005!

Harris arrives in town to accuse Tom of being Crazy Joey Cusack from Philly (if they're so sure he's their guy what are they waiting for?) in a plot twist out of Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, a movie that also borrowed from Hemingway's basic "Killers" set-up. It's almost a relief to switch over from the generic and unfocused Big Theme of the nature of violence to the Big Theme of identity handed down from classic noir titles...unfortunately it's not handled any better. Not only does the subtext leak to the surface with clunkers like somebody randomly observing "Nobody's perfect" prior to the big reveal of Tom's shady former life, the very concept of him "killing Joey" and becoming an entirely new man is way too fuzzy. We never know if he's merely capable of violence or prone to violence, a distinction that may have been fundamental in making any sense out of all of this. Most the details of Joey's past are undisclosed: for all we know he just killed gangsters and was doing a pretty good job of ridding Philadelphia of its poorly-accented criminal overpopulation before being forced to skidaddle. Violence is apparently content to invoke the complicated themes running through genre pictures without doing the legwork of establishing character background or assigning Tom the role of redeemed outlaw or pacifist-turned gunslinger. One title that got dropped a lot in reviews of the movie was Unforgiven, a film that successfully mixes art and pulp and features a character who has abandoned his violent past in favor of family life in the middle of nowhere. He's not a different person, he's a man who indulged in the heedless alcoholism and lawlessness of the west and was lucky enough to live through it and start his life over again; he "ain't like that no more." Clint's movie questions whether a man like that could return to his wicked ways, whether a man formerly prone to violence will forever be capable of violence, without any allusion of some bigger theme.

In the film's most haunting scene Clint describes a fever dream brought on by memories of the past. Dreams are prominent in Cronenberg's movie, from the daughter's opening "dream" following the hotel killers, a diner co-worker who relates a dream he had in which he's actually a demented killer (wink wink) and the question posed to Tom after the verification of his dark identity: "When you dream, are you still Joey?" In a scene wisely cut from the finished film, the best case for my theory that the literalization of the awful screenplay is most to blame for all the movie's problems, an actual dream sequence unambiguously denounces Tom as a man running from his past and frightened of the immediate threat to himself and his family. There's nothing complicated about this in the slightest: Tom's not a conflicted soul struggling between two personalities which harbor the truth of congenital human brutality deep in their joint chest, he's just trying to dig himself out of the bucket of syrup his lies have landed him in.

Tom/Joey's violent tendencies unmask him, but once it's revealed that he is in fact an ex-criminal living a bogus life the reality of his inbred violence that has up to now kept everybody on edge becomes instantly irrelevant: his family merely act indignant over the betrayal. I recently watched Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, in which everyone believes that normal, everyday family guy Henry Fonda is a remorseless serial stick-up man who's been terrorizing the city - they're so convinced that, despite his mild manner and acts unbecoming a clever criminal (like showing up at the same insurance agency he supposedly robbed to withdraw an advance on his policy) witnesses unreservedly avow that he's the guy. Their conviction is so total that Fonda's own wife begins to believe it, and the belief drives her insane. The subplot with the wife is laughably bad, but not quite as bad as the way Edie is portrayed by Mario Bello, who for her part gives a very "Hitchcock performance," possibly worst fake breakdown crying moment I've ever seen, followed by the worst shock-vomiting (later when she fake-cries for the sheriff's benefit, it's more convincing). History also shares the infuriatingly dumb "is he or isn't he?" suspense of Hitchcock's Suspicion which, like Hitchcock's terrible movie, would be interesting if there was any possibility of a twist. But an underdeveloped background for his criminal past, scant variation in Viggo's performance once Joey officially resurfaces and lack of explanation for how he could be anyone other than who these gangsters claim he is make him as unlikely a "wrong man" as Cary Grant at the height of his fame was a scheming woman murderer.

Then there are the film's two sex scenes that critics made such a huge deal out of. In the first Edie puts on a cheerleader outfit and ends up in a suggestively mutual mouth-to-genital position with Tom, in the second the two grapple on the stairs of their home before engaging in rough, dry intercourse. Cronenberg requested these scenes be added to the script, which seems like evidence of him trying to put something of himself into a project that had nothing to do with the kind of things he's usually associated with. While the first one is easily the most tantalizing sex scene to appear in one of the director's movies (probably because it doesn't involve any kind of leg wound or end up as a threesome with a fleshy mutant), I'm not quite clear as to the relevance of its inclusion. It could be that Edie's role playing is supposed to set up the idea of disguised identity but that doesn't really work. The outfit is like lingerie, used to entice - it's not indicative of a past in the pom pom squad, and even if it was Edie's high school extracurricular activities aren't a suppressed part of her nature; the two things have nothing to do with each other. If the scene wants to imply a sordid reality within the household it fails to do so. I don't see how this healthy, leather-free lovemaking is any different than the tame kind of stuff we've all experimented with at some point (although I guess for "normal" people dressing like a cheerleader and 69ing is as Cronenbergian as you get). Most likely it's meant to set-up the later scene, a slightly offensive/unapologetically melodramatic act of attempted rape that turns flimsily consensual when Edie decides she's into it. That this is a violent coital session compared to the tender original scene means absolutely nothing, it's just a sensationalized attempt to show that the characters have changed when they really haven't. These aren't two characters wresting for control or dominance, they're two actors grabbing at each other's clothes in a scene no different from any generic soap opera where the male actor grabs the actress and she struggles before letting herself succumb to the passion of the moment. If it counts as one of the movie's "violent" moments and wants to show that violence can be attractive or a turn on, there's literally nothing to say about the scene except that it's a jaw-droppingly dumb moment that doesn't even warrant that level of consideration. I'll give the first scene a pass because a good sex scene is never unwelcome, but the second one is as forced upon the narrative as the husband is upon his wife.

(Going over that last paragraph I realize that once again I'm basing my problems with these scenes more on the fact that reviewers attached meanings to them that simply don't exist, although to be fair Cronenberg once said in an interview that his intention with this scene was indeed the old "attraction/repulsion" symbosis. In his defense, the scene at least doesn't have the kind of forced feel of importance that some of the others do; Howard Shore's score continues playing over it instead of drowning out to punctuate the "seriousness" of the situation. Still, the inclusion of the sequence is just a bad decision by the director.)

Speaking of bad decisions, can you believe the bullies return in yet another scene? That bit with the pick-up killers was egregious, but it would have at least been a good place to lose these retarded characters. Inspired by his father's liberal treatment of the would-be murderers, Jack decides to stand his frumpy ground and make like Ralphie Parker by doling out some double-fisted justice on these turkeys when they return to manhandle him in the school hallway. I mentioned that the bully was no Richard Tyson and hardly posed an actual threat, but he's probably at least capable of defending himself. The problem is that not only is Jack now willing to use force against his oppressors, he's suddenly become inhumanly strong. In fact, what the hallway fight most reminds me of is Peter Parker laying out Flash Thompson between the lockers in the first Spiderman movie (in which the character's superhuman strength is actually explained in the narrative - radioactive spider, got it! Besides Cronenberg already made his own Spiderman movie - it was called Spider and starred Ralph Fiennes as the Peter Parker character.) I guess the idea here is that violence can be inherited, like a dormant gene that could present itself at any time, imbuing its host with Spidey Strength at any given moment in sort of an Unbreakable vein. "It's a good thing my dad's such a violent person who impregnated my mom with his violent seed so I could one day develop quick balletic violent responses myself!" The little girl should try throwing a piano like Superman's kid sometime, it'll probably work (a missed opportunity, Josh Olson - where are the little kindergarten bullies dominating the sandbox?) I guess the superhuman reactions and strength of Tom himself are pretty ridiculous too, that a man out of the practice of killing people for at least 15 years would still be so adept at it...it must be like riding a bicycle. The other suggestion is simply that violence begets violence, as it it were an anthropomorphic entity that breeds in the closet like rabbits. That idea would invoke the title, but wouldn't it have been easier to make a movie where one guy kicks another in the knee, the wounded fella is so honked off about it that he slaps his nephew who in turn goes outside and stomps on an ant farm? The cycle of violence is literally endless!

This bully bashing is obviously meant to reflect the diner scene, which led me to question which poorly-drawn characters were least convincingly "tough," the voice-raising goateed old man with his (first figuratively then literally) faceless companion or the kid with the pompadour and his toadie. Ah who am I kidding, the goofy gangsters out of Philly clearly take the cake what with their terrifying coffee-ordering and ultra-scary double parking. So the bully is beaten and Tom chews Jack out over it, announcing that the bully's parents are going to sue (can you do that? a minor SUED over a school fight? suspended/expelled maybe but SUED? Is that supposed to be another consequence of violence, you might get sued?), and this controversy leads to what is possibly the most nonsensical exchange of dialogue in the History of Movies. Tom says, "In this family, we don't solve our problems by hitting people!" and Jack counters, "No, in this family we shoot them!" and Tom slaps him across the face. Can neither of them truly differentiate between getting in a fight at school and killing two armed people who are threatening to murder your friends and co-workers? At this stage of the film it's impossible and pointless to even guess what logic these characters are following or where the useless plot could be headed. Ed Harris turns up with his goons on the front lawn holding a captive Jack (who fled the house post-slapping pouty faced with arms flailing) and we go through the diner gunplay all over again - bad guys die, Tom is injured - with the son-standing-up-for-himself/violence-passed-on-to-the-child symbolism of the bully fight made redundant when Jack finishes Harris off with a shotgun blast to the back. If there is a point to all this, it's getting whammed repeatedly on the head with a dull hammer.

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