Escaping the Past
Posted on | October 10, 2005 at 12:10 pm | Comments Off
This weekend I saw the latest comic-book-to-movie blockbuster, A History of Violence. (Yes, though they haven’t advertised it as such, it is based on a DC comic book, err… “graphic novel”.) It’s a taut little character study (of not just the main character, but his family as well) of the type that I don’t usually associate with director David Cronenberg. Yes, it’s shot through with brief but shocking bits of violence and has some lurid thriller elements built in, but mostly it’s the character moments that make it. Viggo Mortensen is intense as Tom Stall, the man who may or may not be a victim of mistaken identity; after stopping a robbery at his small town diner, he is badgered by mobsters who saw him on the national news and recognized him as a long-thought-dead fellow mobster whom scores need to be settled against. Maria Bello plays his wife Edie, who is trying to come to grips with realizing the man she has shared her life with may not be the man she has known all these years at all. There’s one really shocking scene between the two of them that takes the movie into almost a surreal realm. William Hurt has a brief but fascinating turn in a role you usually expect to see played by Christopher Walken. And I also have to single out young Ashton Holmes as Tom’s son, who grows up real fast, and also shows you just can’t get away from genetics. Even veteran character actor Peter MacNeil manages to play the smalltown sheriff in a conventional way but different from the usual movie stereotype. And Ed Harris is always good, of course.
Though there aren’t a bunch of huge plot twists (it’s fairly predictable/logical), I don’t want to say any more about the plot and potentially spoil it. I really liked the fact that the movie was not too long and did not overstay its welcome. At just over an hour and a half, it managed to get in, tell its story, and get out. Some people may not like the ending, as it didn’t give a lot of closure, but it was consistent with the tone of the rest of the movie. Character moments are often conveyed through looks and gestures between people rather than by long stretches of dialog/exposition, which I found refreshing and captivating. It’s not boring. But it does mean you have to put a little more effort into deciphering it than you do into your ordinary Hollywood movie. It’s worth it. I rate it as Entertaining on my movie rating scale.
Latre.