Second Chances: A History of Violence (page 4)

SECOND CHANCES

john cribbs

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

page 4

So in the history of A History of Violence there's been all sorts of violence occurring including motel mass murder, self defense shotgun blasting, sissy-bully bashing, sissy-son slapping and rape that the woman turns out to enjoy so it's ok. Many critics have learned that attaching a ton of gobbledigook to the movie will make them seem smart, but the rest of us have learned absolutely nothing except possibly that violence exists in the world and if your dad has a violent past you will suddenly possess Spiderman-like powers. Also Peter Travers has a problem with cheerleader sex (that may be speculative on my part). By all accounts there should be nothing left to add, but the third act takes Tom to Philadelphia for one final showdown of the horrible horrible accents. The eleventh hour introduction of a big foreboding mansion where seedy happenings transpire reminded me of Stanley Kubrick's underwhelming swan song Eyes Wide Shut - the vacuous fake suspense in the second half of that movie with the veiled threats aimed at Tom Cruise's doctor by the masked orgy society was about as scary as William Hurt, hamfisting it all the way to the Oscars in his turn as a goofy Irish mobster. He admits to Tom that "when mom brought you home from the hospital I tried to strangle you in your crib...I guess all kids try to do that," a line that suggests at this point nothing should be taken seriously. Considering his performance Hurt's scene is the first that feels like it should in fact be "funny," but what a strange way to end a movie where danger and violence has supposedly been looming perpetually in the background. As a thriller the movie's been subpar up to this point, but in this finale the implication of any kind of actual danger is just chucked out the window.

This Philadelphia sequence perplexes me to no end. For one thing, I thought I lived in a reality where a majority of people who saw this movie would say "Oh jesus yeah, History of Violence - awful awful movie, but it was worth seeing for William Hurt's wacky performance at the very end. Not that he was good or anything, but at least he seemed to not be taking anything too seriously." But it turns out people loved Hurt's over-the-top histrionics, enough to nominate him for an Oscar despite his limited screen time and despite - you know, his performance. Upon second viewing his presence at the end doesn't provide quite the same amount of relief from the preceding 80 minutes of uninspired dreck, probably because I knew what to expect so it was less beguiling. This time around I was also aware of the film's abrupt ending: Tom returning home in time for a good old stereotypical American meatloaf dinner and being wordlessly invited back into the family. This also reminded me of Eyes Wide Shut: Nicole Kidman's final sentiment about how "we should be grateful that we've managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream," bringing the movie back full circle to where the characters were at the beginning as if nothing had happened. The crux of the family conflict should be starting here; the consequences of Tom's actions that we've all been waiting for should be starting to manifest. Instead we're left with Tom staring across at his family as the picture cuts to black. Josh Olson has said that he ended his screenplay with the two-word declaration: "There's hope." What hope? That the movie will get good now? Oh whoops it's over.

"Violence lies in all of us, and we can't escape our violent natures" seems to sum up what the film was going for in the long run. I just don't understand why the movie couldn't apply that enticing theme to a straight-forward story told without irony or broad caricatures. It's comparable to Stuart Gordon's unpretentious King of the Ants, a film about a man who doesn't come from a history of violence but discovers that he has it in himself to be a killer, and whether good or bad that's what defines him, an inescapable destiny just as likely to condemn him as it is to save his life. Even though Tom Stall's acts of retaliation are clear cases of justifiable self defense against people identified to the audience as remorseless killers and Ants' Sean Crawley is an amateur hitman who murders an innocent stranger, I'm much more sympathetic of Crawley, only occasionally getting that uncomfortable "I'm not with him!" feeling when he's committing acts of violence. That's not just because Tom is a horribly-written character unconvincingly portrayed by Viggo Mortensen: History's theme of violence develops from a past that's hinted at on screen but never coalesces with the present setting of the movie, whereas the character of Crawley evolves through the story from his own discovery of the horror within. In a lot of ways, King of the Ants is the closest thing to what I hoped A History of Violence would turn out to be going into it the first time (not to hark on it too much, but family relationships and sexuality in relation to violence are also more interestingly examined in Gordon's film).

I could drone on forever speculating what could and been, but honestly this Second Chances has convinced me that the film really doesn't merit that amount of consideration. It's a movie that feels like it wants to prove something, which Cronenberg's great movies never had to do. What if his previous films had titles like A History of Perverts Who Like Getting It On with Car Crash Victims' Leg Wounds? The broadness and lack of sophistication is staggering. I don't know whether or not he signed on specifically for what he thought might be some sort of dissection of violence in American cinema/cinema in general/society in general, I just know that it's not a good fit. For one thing, the only kind of dissection I want to see in a Cronenberg film is one that involves inventive orifices and wriggling new body parts - that's just me. By the way, I realize some people might mistakenly think I don't like History of Violence because there are no inventive orifices or wriggling new body parts in it, but that's completely untrue...I know I've made some flippant remarks about how Cronenberg's ability to make movies about typewriters with talking anuses more believable than a melodrama set in the alleged "real world," but I'm really just trying to come to terms with why that is, I'm not criticizing Violence for lacking his more outrageous signatures. I certainly wouldn't critique the amazing Spider - or, for that matter, The Dead Zone or underrated M Butterfly - for the same reason. More than anything, I think it's worth examining the parts of the film that are nowhere in the same vacinity of what Cronenberg had dealt with in his sixteen previous feature films, such as the shot of a bloodied Tom stumbling out to the pond behind the mansion to baptize himself free of violence after taking out the last of the gangsters. Cronenberg, a self-described atheist, has never stooped to religious symbolism in a movie, and never anything so brazenly obvious (For what it's worth I should mention however that Peter Suschitzky makes this shot gorgeous...what a waste). Whether out of a sense of duty to not spoil the ending or just not wanting to touch this baseless late introduction of Christian visual metaphor, most of the movie's supporters haven't mentioned this moment at all. Don't they want to take this opportunity to point out that Tom's last act of violence happens to be against his brother, just like the first act of violence in Genesis? The history of violence, get it?!

What really makes me laugh when I read articles praising the movie are their warnings of its "graphic violence" occurring in a mundane setting where you wouldn't normally expect it to explode. The five major violent acts in Violence are notably tame compared to what its director has come up with in the past. I offer this list of examples...

Cronenberg's history of violence:

- in a high rise populated with young couples and families, a man chases a girl in a school uniform around an apartment, throttles her to death, cuts her chest open, pours acid into her body, then uses the scalpel to slit his own throat (Shivers)

- rushing back to his ordinary suburban home in the wake of an outbreak of transferable viral cannibalism (read: vampirism), a man finds a pool of blood in a crib that used to be a baby - mom's been snacking, and it turns out is hungry for seconds (Rabid)

- in a pre-school/kindergarten class in the middle of the day, two mutant children beat the teacher to death in front of her screaming students using toy hammers (The Brood)

- a man's head explodes on stage during a well-attended exhibit (Scanners)

- in an office in the early morning, some people you thought were your friends trying to help you suddenly cause your abdomen to split open and shove a pulsating video cassette into your body (Videodrome)

The list goes on, the point being: Cronenberg has certainly come up with more shocking moments of violence, ones set among the normal humdrum of everyday life, than those presented as cutting edge in this movie. Even his follow-up film Eastern Promises, a huge improvement over HOV that took place in a unique and weird world that never once felt like it was making excuses for its own phoniness, featured three scenes of extreme violence all effective in their own right, the last of which, the knife fight in the public bathhouse, a tour de force that stands with the best scenes Cronenberg ever directed. Not once during this intense scene do you think, "A knife fight between naked men! In a public bathhouse! In 2007!" The scene is involving enough that, despite its convoluted set-up and environment, it works (the scene garnered a ton of critical attention so I'm guessing it worked for most people). The movie has Viggo once again claiming to be somebody he's not - in reverse, this time trying to make people believe he has a history of violence, one that in truer Cronenberg fashion has been etched into his flesh in the form of Russian gangland tattoos - but the themes of identity (cultural, historical and adapted) are much more in line with the director's interests. Promises' meanings are neither hand-fed or confusing, its characters and settings are believable, and although the big twist may ruin the movie a little, at least there is a twist, or a mild hint of narrative ingenuity. Every set-up in Violence is resolved in the quickest and most prosaic way imaginable: killers threaten your employees or family? Kill them! Bully publicly brings your manhood into question? Beat the shit out of him! Want to make the complicated aspects of your life go away? Just ignore them! Curiously enough I haven't revisited Eastern Promises since seeing it in the theater three years ago, quite possibly for the opposite reason I haven't watched Violence: what happens if it turns out to be worse than I remember?

Did I find anything to like in my first viewing of Cronenberg's film in five years? Only tiny grounded moments that seem to have sneaked into the otherwise counterfeit world of the film. I liked the part where Hurt gets locked out of the final shootout and fumbles around in his pockets for keys to the door while completely ignoring the fact that a madman with a gun is on the other side, a genuinely funny reaction that also seems like the kind of absurd thing you would do in that situation. Another moment of unprecedented authenticity occurs when Edie realizes her daughter is missing at the mall and frantically runs out of the shoe store still wearing the pair of shoes she was trying on, prompting the lowly clerk to insist, "Ma'am, I can't let you leave the store with the shoes!" The credible banality of that moment is helped by the fact that it's shot on location, in an undeniably modern setting that feels like an actual place somewhere in the world. To review, the settings of the movie are: the motel, the Stall home, Millbrook's main street, the school, Tom's diner, the generic hospital room (two different scenes!), the seedy Philadelphia bar and Richie's mansion. The mall is the only time in the movie the characters felt real and seemed to be existing in real life. I enjoyed some silly lines clearly ad-libbed by Ed Harris - "Don't forget your shoe-hoos!" and, when he's ready to take Joey back home, "C'mon, let's go - you won't need your toothbrush." - but not enough to forgive his silly character.

On the dvd documentary, Josh Olson has this to say about Tom's violent nature: "No question he is justified in his self defense. But I also think there's no question that, even without the character of Joey lurking within him, there's a huge cost to whoever does these things. You know, what happens to you when you do that, and what happens to the people around you when you're sort of an ordinary American household." Well...that's the fucking movie right there! That's what the movie SHOULD have been about. That sounds like a CRONENBERG MOVIE, how an ordinary man changes and his life and family's life changes after violence is introduced into their world? That's the kind of movie I'd like to see. Notice how Olson says "even without the character of Joey." Maybe that's what the movie needed to leave out, the character of Joey and the whole gangster background (and, while we're leaving things out, the entire bully subplot for the love of god). Instead it could be a story about how bad men come to town, one of the population's own dispenses of them in a shockingly expert display of violence, and from that point on the dichotomy of the society has changed: now any perceived threats from "outsiders" can be readily dispatched with full consent of the town's people. The introduction of violence into a small town, how it changes them.

Whatever...I didn't write this to suggest the movie this could have been, and don't want to judge it based on what it isn't (then again, that's what its admirers did). One thing it certainly isn't is a terrific big budget action movie from 1996 which also cast Ontario as a stand-in for its own ideal American town, Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Renny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight tells the story of Samantha Caine*, a good-natured schoolteacher who's been suffering from amnesia for eight years. In the time since she's settled down with a loving husband and adorable daughter in a picture-perfect two-story home. A violent incident (in this case a car crash as violent and abrupt as those from Cronenberg's movie of the same year) provokes memories of her past life, one that comes looking for her in the form of a criminal whose eye she tore out back in her shadier days - he happened to see footage of her during a Christmas parade on TV. Turns out she's really "Charly Baltimore," a ruthless assassin with ties to the CIA. Violence comes so naturally to her that her first act as a "reborn" Charly is to mercy kill a buck by snapping its neck; later, she first delights then offputs her family with her natural knife-wielding talents, dicing up fruit then chucking the blade across the room with expert precision ("Chefs can do that!") Like Tom Stall she denies her violent past, but out of genuine befuddlement: the look of astonishment on her face when she realizes she knows how to lock and load a sniper rifle is more honest a moment than anything in A History of Violence.

Everything in Harlin's film rings truer in its naked pulp glory, even the wintery hamlet where Samantha/Charly has found herself - writer Shane Black makes the absurd scenario believable through the lead character's indignity ("It's not a fantasy! I'm in the goddamn PTA!") and the incongruity of an authentically scary albeit over-the-top threat which enters that suburban paradise. I don't just mean the guys coming to kill Samantha and her family (although the home invasion scene is far more intense and palpably dangerous than the one in Violence), but the threat of casual-killer Charly taking over the sweet persona of nurturing mother Samantha. There's a lot on the line in this movie, ultimately the sanctity of the family unit and loss of the more "wholesome" identity, a theme ratified non-diagetically by a creative cover version of the Zombies' "She's Not There" (don't even get me started on the similarities between this and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies).

How come LKG didn't receive the standing ovation and critical commendations that HOV did upon its release? Is it considered more cynical? It may be, but it's far less cloying: the small town and its occupants aren't caricatures, they're real people. The most artificial element of Harlin and Black's portrayal of small town life is a crowd of carolers...but they're being used as a ploy by a gunman to get at Samantha! Is it because the film is an unapologetic popcorn movie that by its nature features a fair share of the kind of giddy bloodletting History of Violence, according to some, is meant to deglamorize? Because while the deaths are obviously more extravagant, the violence (which includes water torture, nasty bullet wounds, threats against a child) is depicted in no less a serious light. Or is it just that, of the two Oscar-winning cast members of The Accidental Tourist, people prefer William Hurt over Geena Davis, even if he's just showing up to chew on the set for 10 minutes? My point is that if someone wants to label History of Violence as anything but a tragic misfire that's their business, but I dare anybody to admit that The Long Kiss Goodnight isn't a better movie five or six times over.

You know...this was a very positive experience for me. I've been ignoring the movie for five years the way Tom/Joey ignored his wacky past, maybe hoping as he did that it would just go away for good, and perhaps one day my wife would dress like a cheerleader to punctuate our ideal life (is that what that scene was supposed to represent?) Now I'm comfortable in just admitting that it's an atrocious piece of crap, that Cronenberg couldn't keep the streak alive forever, that inevitably a terrible script by a shitty writer would come along and for whatever personal or financial reason he'd be forced to turn it into a terrible movie. He has since gone on to make a flawed but above-average crime thriller, thus demonstrating that he's not lost forever and can still get good performances out of folks like Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl and even Viggo himself. A History of Violence was famously the last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS, but unlike the archaic format I no longer feel A History of Violence should disappear from the earth without a trace. I'm ready to acknowledge its right to exist and be terrible. Finally, I'm ready to hate the movie.

The sad appendix to this re-viewing is that I just read a synopsis of The Prince, which is reportedly going to be John Carpenter's first movie in almost a decade. The premise reads, in part, that it's about "the most badass gangster of all time...he's left the life and created this whole new world. He's raising his kid...living in the middle of nowhere and he's this very religious, trying to live a straight life guy." Ah man...the cycle begins again. Guess I'll go start preparing 2016's "Second Chances: John Carpenter's The Prince."

* The name "Caine" brings up an instant picture of the history of violence without overselling it, plus "Sam Caine" is an acronym for "amnesiac!"

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