Last night I watched A History of Violence for the second time. Generally I like watching movies several times (as evidenced by my embarrassingly large DVD collection… don’t ask) but I was struck by how much better this film was on a second viewing. At first glance the film is an excellent B-movie – but on subsequent viewings you can really start to see how powerful the film is.
David Cronenberg has never been a particularly accessible director. As much acclaim as this year’s Best Picture received, Cronenberg’s film of the same name is a slight bit more difficult to sit through. Still his eye for composition and his sense of tension and subtext are powerful. -besides he’s Canadian.
In A History of Violence, Tom Stall is a mild family man living in rural USAmerica. But when he is forced to act to stop a murder he is put in the public spotlight. The limelight attracts attention from the violent past Tom thought he had outrun and his wife, Edie, and family never knew existed.
Brokeback Mountain may have garnered a lot of attention for its look at American sexuality but it’s A History of Violence that is the more provocative. Cronenberg ties the ideas of violence and sexuality so tightly that when the tension is eventually released in a troubling scene, the struggle between Edie’s distance from her husband and her lust for this new violent alter-ego makes this one of the most uncomfortable sex-scenes around.
The film is a powerful statement about what we normalize and how we both abhor and scramble to consume violence and darkness. As Peter Travers _Rolling Stone, puts it, “The family tableau that ends the film is as chilling and redemptive as anything Cronenberg has ever crafted.” What’s chilling is the fact that this is not the redemption we are looking for. This is an acceptance and internalization of the darkness we see in each other. The close of the film is not about a forgiveness that removes the guilt and shame of sin, it is a forced submission of conscience; a choice to ignore and silently condone the darkness in each of us; something we do everyday in order to avoid the confrontation and acknowledgement that precedes true redemption.
