A History of Violence

Master director David Cronenberg has now made his masterpiece, at least until his next film comes out. AhoV is a perfect film noir, with a little Out of the Past mixed with some Scarlett Street and a healthy dose of The Big Heat, and, strangely, a soupcon of Blue Velvet, only without the overt weirdness. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) owns a diner in a small town in Indiana. When two killers come in and threaten to murder everyone in the place, Tom shows that he’s better at killing than they are, leaving them both dead on the floor, shot with their own guns. Clearly, Tom has a history of, oh, I don’t know, maybe violence? And when his small-town hero status exposes him to a world he’d thought he’d left behind, he finds that character is not as malleable as he’d hoped. Awesome performances by Mortensen and the extremely hot Maria Bello as his wife are complemented by eerily muted cinematography and a laconic script that masterfully explains the back story without ever stooping to unnatural exposition. This is one of the best American films of 2005, and of course, it was largely ignored at Oscar time. Catch it now while it spends its requisite 20 minutes in the theater before showing up in the DVD bargain bin.