| A History of Violence Posted: Not since STRAW DOGS (1971) have I seen a film that so strikingly makes the point that the capacity for violence is an inseparable part of the human condition. Even the meek inheriting the Earth have it - if pushed far enough.
Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) and wife Edie (Maria Bello) live in a small mid-western town with teenage son Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young daughter Sarah (Heidi Hayes). The couple own, and Tom manages, a diner on Main Street. One night at closing, two psychopathic killers enter the eatery to rob the place and have some bloody fun. (We know they're psychopaths because the film's opening sequence shows them brutally murdering a family that owns a roadside motel.) As his waitress is about to be raped, Tom reacts in a way that would make Dirty Harry proud. The killers are rendered dead in pools of blood, coffee, and broken glass, and Tom, with his foot impaled by a knife, becomes a local hero that makes the national TV news. However, this notoriety draws out of the woodwork a scarred, Mafia hit man from Philadelphia, Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), and a pair of associate thugs. Carl insists to Tom and Edie that the former is really Joey Cusack, a big city killer that tried to take out Carl's left eye with barbed wire. Tom, of course, denies that he's ever been to Philly. Edie believes her husband. At least she does until witnessing his reaction when Fogarty et al confront Tom on their front lawn after they kidnap Jack. Maybe Hubby has secrets, you think?
At first, the audience believes that son Jack is a spineless wimp - until he's pushed too far in the hallway of his high school by a bully that's been tormenting him. (Is there an inheritable gene for mayhem, you might ask.) From all of us who've had sand kicked in our faces, way to go, kid!... Even Edie isn't as turned off by violence as much as the thought that Tom has been lying to her all their married life. Indeed, an angry confrontation between the two escalates to a bout of consensual, frenzied sex that, while perhaps not "rough", was certainly uncomfortable and left bruises. (Is sex but low-level violence much as James Coburn's character in the 1967 comedy western WATERHOLE #3 called sex "assault with a friendly weapon"?)
Despite Tom's evident past, he's now a loving, committed father and husband and a solid, law abiding member of the community. OK, so he has a few lapses into old habits; they're all for good causes. As the very last scene infers, perhaps Edie can live with it. After all, she and her Hearth and Home are more stoutly defended by Tom's darker side than by some pacifist that wouldn't act until it's too late; other tribes should be so lucky.
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is a gritty, well-acted, visual essay that neither condones nor condemns the potential for violence that exists in all of us. It's just there waiting in the tall grass to be called forth as needed, and there's no anguished, PC-inspired, hand-wringing about that fact. It's not the greatest film of 2005, but I liked it very much. |
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