Two men enter Tom Stall's diner on Main Street and ask for coffee. It's late, and the street lights outside the window are bright. Tom tells them the place is about to close, but the men still want their coffee. Tom serves them, but he also tells the waitress she can leave.
When she gets to the door, one of the men throws her down as the other pulls out his gun. If they were just highway men, they'd only want the diner's money. These two aren't highway men. When he realizes this, Tom does to them what they were planning to do to everyone else in the diner.
So begins David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, a taut, powerful film, booby-trapped with disturbing revelations and gut-twisting imagery. The movie has the most elusive of all cinematic virtues: It is wholly justified for excesses it must commit.
Based on a comic book by John Wagner and Vince Locke, A History of Violence is a reflection on violence -- of where it's been and where it has settled within the vast landscape of American film and culture. The movie dwells within the murky basin of its subject, never shying away from its depiction or its repercussions. It is a queasy thing to think about, but at the heart of the film is the question: Why are some people really good at killing?
The reason, it seems, is survival. If Tom Stall was only a small-town business owner with two kids and a pretty wife, just a modest man of simple wants, then he would have been obliterated by the bullets of the two men he killed. That he did what he did with such brutal efficiency suggests there's something altogether different beneath his Jimmy Stewart exterior.
Yet the film's intent is not subversive. It does not relish the hypocrisy of Americana and its small-town ideals, nor does it fall back on convenient nihilism. In what could have been irony and cynicism, the film finds poignancy and redemption.
Yes, American myth is populated by heroes who live in worlds of revolving doors, where the stuttering Clark Kents switch into rock'em sock'em Supermen by visiting phone booths. Then they put on some glasses to go back to their desk jobs. The film recognizes this, but it also recognizes such a world is more complex than simple two-color comics.
As the film reveals, Tom Stall has a talent for hurting people. Yet he is still good, not because he purges his killer instincts, but because he has mastery over them. Man rises above nature, not because he is a saint, but because he can choose not to sin.
How the movie sneaks in this point under the cover of a schlock potboiler makes it a study in careful filmmaking.
Part of the answer is found in the performances. Viggo Mortensen is an apt casting choice, because his persona allows him to appear both humble and mysterious. Maria Bello gives a heroic performance as his beleaguered wife.
Yet the crux of the film's architecture is in its subtle framing. This is a movie of parallels and counterpoint underneath the routine of cliché and traditions. Consider how the family dinner is portrayed before and after the diner scene.
Yet the film does not beat our heads in with its message. It does not walk over our intellect as it could with a gaudy parade of Jungian archetypes or stomp our sensibility under the goose-stepping of contrived camera sweeps. It is lean and commanding, expressing much more by always saying less.
The great filmmaker Howard Hawks quipped, "A good movie is three good scenes and no bad ones." I think he would agree A History of Violence is a great movie.
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