A History of Violence

David Cronenberg is and has been one of the most consistently interesting directors at work in English language cinema. He is to the movie business what his contemporaries and compatriots Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are to the music business. Of his eclectic and esoteric back catalogue maybe this film is closest to The Dead Zone in its tone and off-kilter take on small town America.

In an Oscar-worthy performance, Mortensen Plays Tom Stall; proprietor of the local cafe, happily married to Edie (Bello), and attentive father to a teenage son and young daughter. Cronenberg establishes all of this with his customary painstaking exactitude, abetted by his regular collaborators cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and composer Howard Shore.

Toward this impossibly ideal marriage, in an impossibly ideal home, in an impossibly ideal town, drive two serial murderers. Stall's instinctive reaction when they arrive in his cafe exposes a side to him that he cannot explain away, especially when Fogarty (Harris), an Irish mobster from Philly, turns up and greets him as long lost hard man Joey Cusack.

Like in nearly every other Cronenberg film, what is perhaps most realistically represented is the sex and the violence, things that are hidden in everyday life. Everything else, the surfaces of everyday life are rendered so 'real' that the audience knows something is up, that something is going to go horribly wrong at any moment. One of the best films of the year.