A History of Violence

Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt

Dir David Cronenberg

Overall, leaves the viewer with mixed emotions – a difficult anti-hero, because he is a cold-blooded killer who just wants to sit down and have a normal life, but then, how can he, with such a past? The real tragedy is marked out by the children, who have been born with this curse, and what’s good about the story is that it subtly brings these questions to the fore – for example, Viggo’s son who starts the movie as a scrawny weakling getting bullied, but when he finally stands up for himself he beats the tar out of the bullies in ways he never dreamed of. Then, when he’s forced to kill the mobster who’s going to off his dad, we can tell that here is the link – the fact that a son is a product of the father, regardless of how the father had tried to submerge those instincts.

But then, the movie doesn’t fully explore or answer those questions. After that scene, Viggo’s character gasses up the car to head back to Philly to face his demons, in this case, his brother (William Hurt), and the movie gives us this gruesome action standoff which is as graphic as all the other killings in this film.

And then at the end, which was supposed to be poignant – Viggo comes back to the family and for five minutes of silence, the toddler daughter brings his plate to the table and the son silently slides him his meatloaf, and we are meant to understand that now, with the demons of the past truly in the ground, he finally can have the family life of which he’s always dreamed.

That’s the uncomfortable part: he can have it, after murdering in a vicious manner some 10 human beings, but we know he’ll never be brought to justice, because it was self-defense, and these we’re bad guys anyway, right? So, basically, the moral is that you kill your way out of your problems, and when you’ve left nothing behind you but a blood trail and smashed skulls, you can throw your gun into the pond and live happily ever after.

Sadly, this is just one more of too many movies telling us the same thing. And while it gets closer to the psychological implications than other movies, it still proposes no other solution.

Maybe I’m being too hard - I don’t know. Perhaps the story would be better as a novel, in which the implications for the family could be further fleshed out. Because I like the characters, especially the son, and I think how they actually heal themselves would be far more interesting than the actual blood n guts.

That would be a good idea for whoever wrote the screenplay. Make it into a novel. Show us how they survive this without going completely insane.

VG