The Cronenberg Thread

Didn't buy Viggo as smalltown diner guy or Philly thug.

If "In the Bedroom" was a revenge flick for the NPR crowd, AHOV is one for _________?

btw, the grosses aren't all that great ($25 M or so), and this was supposed to be DC's first 'broad appeal' project in years. Can the masses tell his heart wasn't really in it, or do they just find it airless?

I like the way people keep referring to Cronenberg's idea of small town life as "generic," when in fact it seemed quite real to me. People driving around blasting hip-hop. Kids smoking pot on the corner. Hardly Capra, very contemporary. That was my first real clue that I was in for something far deeper than the usual "darkness lurks beneath the surface of small town life" trope.

On September 23, a great American movie opened in the US, and New Line, the distributor, revealed it at just 14 theatres. I am not complaining - I love and respect old-fashioned opening plans where just a few cities get a picture at first and then the word goes out. And New Line had their arguments: it wasn't that David Cronenberg was prepared to have this movie called Recoil! or The Last Day in Tom Stall's Life. No, this movie has a chilling edge of academic authority or analytic dread. It's called A History of Violence. And it's the first unmistakably great American film since Mulholland Dr., even if it is made by a Canadian.

Cronenberg is 62 now. Born and raised in Toronto, he still lives there, and his work is followed at an international level, but without the solid, financial reward that can change a man, or an artist. When he made Spider a few years ago, an uncompromisingly bleak study of schizophrenia in which Ralph Fiennes had hardly a word of dialogue, Cronenberg's determination to follow his own vision nearly destroyed the enterprise for lack of funds. And there will be some viewers now inclined to see A History of Violence as a sell-out, a desperate excursion into full-blooded film noir about the kind of things that happen - notoriously - not in Canada but in the United States.

Tom Stall is a gaunt-looking fellow with a dreamy smile on his face and an easy manner that fits in to the small Indiana town where he owns a diner called Stall's. He looks a lot like Viggo Mortensen. He has a wife, Maria Bello, and two decent kids. The teenage boy is mocked at school for not being as male as Indiana prefers. But Tom and his wife still have a wild, tender sex life of the kind that might not be owned up to in all towns in Indiana. But even though this is "sleepy" Indiana, the air is as taut as an old wire ready to snap. Something terrible is coming, and we know after just a few minutes that Cronenberg has devised and outfitted the terror in keeping with the "Let's do an experiment" tone of the title.

In the past, Cronenberg has been one of the world's most creative experimenters with the horror genre. I suspect that was because he felt able to push that genre towards his own necessary economy plus the quite startling dismemberment or parasitic possession of his vision. This was evident in They Came From Within, Rabid, The Brood, The Dead Zone and even The Fly, which was the first glorious blooming of his special sense of humour. But still, there was something very deliberate in Cronenberg that felt unable to get into what you might call popular genre. But like many ascetics, familiarity with his own medium has made his search for formal beauty more fundamental. And that is what is so American: for nearly always, I think, the most radical departures in American come with the telling of the old, old stories.

So this is a myth composed by a master that operates at the level of pulp fiction, or graphic novel - its actual source material. Ed Harris and later William Hurt take a huge exultant pleasure in knowing that they are playing stock figures from that tradition. And they know that we are loving hating them. But beyond that this is a superb story of a marriage, in which a great lie has been told, but guessed at? And even hoped for? The interaction of Mortensen and Maria Bello is actually the core to what the title is about, and their two love and sex scenes are the essence of this stunning movie. And when the family next sits down to dinner together the air is still taut with new discoveries and the affirmation of very old truths. By letting himself make a simpler kind of picture, Cronenberg has left us not so much with his glittering intelligence as a kind of question that the US has to ask itself.

Quite deliberately, I am not telling you the story of A History of Violence. That's because it employs a formula you've seen before, but gives it a radically new rhythm, one in which the atmosphere of the title is not just the energy that renews the country and which makes it safe and dangerous again. This film is a preparation for the uncertainty of the last few shots.

Just as with the close of The Deer Hunter, where survivors sing softly, "America the Beautiful", we are left to weight the balance of irony and forgiveness.

Those two films are ideal material to be shown to soldiers just returned from a war where the ordeal of survival eclipsed all thought of what the war was about.

Thomson is OTM about the "new rhythm" of "AHOV."

"radical new rhythm" -- just ridiculous!

It wasn't released as one (it got a slow roll-out, per usual for mainstreamish arthouse fare), every review focused on the Cronenberg connection, it wasn't advertised as standard action/vengeance flick.

You could make that statement for something like Starship Troopers - and the fact that wasn't a typical action/vengeance movie led to some bad feeling from the audience - but AHOV was released as an artsy Cronenberg film. If there was subversion attempted, it was a failure.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4426386.stm

THE HEAVENS WEEP :-(

I wonder if it'll be even better than Nip/Tuck..

(Also, my main reaction was: that was the most violentest violence that was every violented. jeeeeezUS!)

And the boys go into business and marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

I thought this guy nailed AHOV:

"Dear A History of Violence,

This is hard for me. I hardly know what to say. Maybe I should just shoot straight with you. You're a B-picture. Now, I don't mean this in a bad way. Lots of really cool movies fall into this category. But really, you and I had a good time and all, expecting some big twist that never came (good for you!) and having that steamy rendezvous on the stairs and oh yeah, William Hurt. He was awesome. But you're just not quite top ten material, and if that hurts you I'm sorry. I know lots of other viewers love you, but to me, it's like you just reflect back whatever anyone wants to see in you. Critique of violence in the Gulf War II era? Okay. Portrait of fractured masculinity? You got it. Subdued Cronenbergian treatise on the body in crisis? I'm your film. Etc. Etc. I mean, look, I enjoyed our time together but surely you didn't think this was serious, did you?"

http://www.geocities.com/michaelsicinski/2005notgoodenoughformyexactingtaste.htm

It was #6 apparently.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a happy family man running a diner in idyllic small-town Indiana, with a lawyer wife (Maria Bello), a teenage son (Ashton Holmes), and a little girl (Heidi Hayes). One night he responds so deftly and definitively to the violent threats of two killers that he becomes a local hero. A Philadelphia mobster named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) hears of the story and soon arrives in town claiming that Tom has another name and background -- that he was once a gangster himself who mutilated one of Fogarty's eyes with barbed wire.

Is A History of Violence a popular genre movie, soliciting visceral, unthinking responses to its violence while evoking westerns and noirs? Or is it an art film, reflecting on the meaning, implications, and effects of its violence, and getting us to do the same? David Cronenberg's genius here is the way he makes it impossible to settle this question.

You can't logically claim that it's both kinds of movie at once -- the devices and intentions of one interfere with those of the other. Yet Cronenberg is so adept at tinkering with our thoughts about violence that he comes very close to pulling off this feat. He provokes confused emotional responses -- laughter at serious moments and spontaneous applause at some of the violent ones -- that might embarrass us, but Cronenberg isn't engaging in parody or irony. Nor is he nihilistically pandering to our worst impulses: the filmmaking is too measured and too intelligent. He implicitly respects us and our responses, even when those responses are silly or disturbing.

There's hardly a shot, setting, character, line of dialogue, or piece of action in A History of Violence that can't be seen as some sort of cliche. Its fantasies about how American small towns are paradise and big cities are hell are genre standbys that Cronenberg milks at every turn. But none of this plays like cliche; Cronenberg is such an uncommon master of tone that we're in a state of denial about our familiarity with the material -- a kind of willed innocence that resembles Tom Stall's own disavowals. (Warning: what follows is full of spoilers.)

Cronenberg keeps his camera too close to Stall's violence to let us feel detached from it. He also takes care to show the immediate consequences of violence -- such as what a shotgun can do to someone's face -- without rubbing our noses in it. But our proximity never allows for any simple identification with Stall -- or if it does, we eventually feel penalized because we don't really know who he is. (His elected surname surely isn't irrelevant.) There's a similar ambiguity in that Cronenberg has spent most of his life and career in Toronto; you might call him a next-door neighbor to the American dream, which includes the cherished idea that we can start our lives over again with a clean slate. We seem to believe and doubt that idea with equal conviction, and the uneasy laughs the film draws out reflect this familiar brand of doublethink.

So do the two remarkable sex scenes between Tom and his wife before and after she learns about his violent past (reportedly Cronenberg's main contributions to Josh Olson's script). In the first, she starts out dominant, playfully dressed as a cheerleader ("because we never got to be teenagers together"), though he winds up on top; the second is spurred by his rough aggression, and she's turned on even though she no longer wants to share the same bed with him. Both scenes testify to the uncommon skills of Mortensen and Bello: they expose more layers of personality than we can possibly keep up with.

At Cannes last May Alexander Horwath -- director of the Austrian Film Museum and one of Europe's best film critics -- caused a minor scandal by loudly berating his colleagues for laughing during a screening of the film. It's easy to feel superior to this behavior, especially since Cronenberg himself has said he doesn't regard laughter as an inappropriate response to certain scenes. But I think Horwath's anger is in some ways a sensitive response. Cronenberg isn't a posthumanist cynic like Lars von Trier, whose nihilism we honor by jeering along with him. Cronenberg is a troubled moralist who doesn't succumb to political correctness about violence, and the meaning of our laughter, however "appropriate," is part of what bothers him.

I've seen the film twice, with very different audiences -- at a gala in Toronto with the filmmakers and cast present and at a local preview with a mainly younger crowd -- and it was uncanny to hear both the laughter and spontaneous applause occur at precisely the same places. The most memorable instances followed two scenes in which Tom's teenage son, Jack, is taunted, insulted, and provoked at school by a classmate.

The first time, in a locker room, Jack defuses the tension, lightly mocking the insults by accepting and even embroidering them. The second time, in a hallway, he again tries to remain cool, but when that doesn't work he beats both the bully and his friend to a bloody pulp. The audience all but cheered -- boorishness won out. Even after we learn that both boys have landed in the hospital, their families might sue, Jack has been suspended from school, and Tom is furious, Jack's stupidity and momentary loss of control are still being celebrated. (A moment later, a similar point gets made when Tom says to Jack, "In this family, we don't solve problems by hitting people." Jack snaps back, "No, we shoot them," and Tom slaps him in response, immediately disproving his point. This time no one applauded, at either screening.)

Jack's comebacks in the locker room got some laughs, but certainly not applause. I'd wager this has to do with our programmed responses to genre; thoughtful responses (which you might call "art-house" responses) are likely to come later and more slowly. But in either case Cronenberg sets up our reactions, both simple and complex, with equal care. Combined with the visceral responses he creates, our thoughts become more than theoretical -- we wind up experiencing them in our gut.

Oh, who needs logic! art doesn't need logic. seriously.

(most of my comments are Oct 18, Mo)

This is so true. Most of Kings & Queen worked because of the vertigo it induced in me. The shift in tones in AHOV, sometimes within the same scene, were almost Hitchcockian, with Cronenberg's similarly clammy regard for people perversely warm and human this time around, thanks in no small part to Bello and Mortensen.

And I detected no self-importance in AHOV, for the same reason I don't view Blue Velvet as a Horrifying Critique of Reagan's America. AHOV is a B-movie purified. Whether you think B-movies need purifying is a whole other question.

Sicinski is pretty much the smartest non-professional critic I know of. He could've put Crash in his top ten and I would've rushed to give it a second look.