An average family man in Anytown, USA. Known for subversive science fiction work like ExisTenz, The Fly and Videodrome, this is the last subject fans of David Cronenberg would expect him to tackle. And during the first few scenes of A History of Violence, the story of a simple, small-town guy trying to protect his family from big city bad guys, it does seem like the director has turned over a conventional new leaf.
Viggo Mortensen stars as Tom Stall, a loving father and husband who appears quietly honorable, if a bit passive, as he makes coffee and serves the locals at his family’s restaurant. But when two murderous drifters pick his diner to make their next score, a new Tom Stall emerges – and this Tom Stall is anything but passive.
Without a flinch, Tom makes efficient, bloody work of the would-be killers and winds up becoming the town hero, with television vans and newspaper reporters camped outside his house.
Unfortunately, the attention of the press also brings with it the attention of some Philadelphia mobsters. They insist that Tom is really a former hit-man named Joey who fled Philly 20 years earlier. Tom flatly denies the accusation, but as the gangsters put more pressure on Tom and his family, his wife (Maria Bello) begins to suspect that the man she married may indeed be keeping some long-held secrets.
In just about any other director’s hands, this premise would lead to a standard film-noir thriller. But David Cronenberg is not any other director, and it quickly becomes clear that he isn’t interested in merely entertaining us.
Like the semi-hokey persona of Tom Stall, every element (including a Mayberryish sub-plot involving Tom’s son and bully) means much more than it appears to on the surface, starting with Tom’s heroic act which is shown in shockingly gruesome detail.
Cronenberg makes the utmost use of his R rating in a way that harkens back to films of the late seventies—it’s a raw, pummeling, Taxi Driver kind of R, which is a very different thing from the recent choreographed, cutesy, Kill Bill kind of R. By allowing realistic carnage to intrude in the life of this quiet, loving family, Cronenberg accomplishes something that’s seemingly all-but-impossible in an era of CSI on primetime: he makes us shudder even when the scummiest low-life meets a well-deserved death.
However, at some points Cronenberg pushes the envelope too far. Where one could argue that his first hard pornographic scene reveals something crucial about the kind of man and husband Tom Stall is, the second simply feels cheap and, to any woman in the room, laughably unrealistic.