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When David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence came out, critics in English Canada said that it was “the best Canadian movie of the year” while in Quebec, an ethnically French-speaking province, the critics said that it was “the best foreign movie of the year”. Obviously, director David Cronenberg (eXistenZ) and the members of the crew are all Canadians, but A History of Violence was produced by an American movie company nonetheless. Still, despite being quite different from David Cronenberg’s previous movies, in general, A History of Violence brings you on other fields, in a manner of speaking. However, I should warn you that if you do have a weak stomach, just don’t watch A History of Violence because of its violent action scenes that are definitely not meant to entertain people.

As it was said in the introduction, A History of Violence brings you in another artistic field of Canadian movie director David Cronenberg mostly because of the movie’s high budget. While most movies of Cronenberg belong to the category of “cinéma d’auteur”, A History of Violence is, on the other hand, something that we can label as a “commercial movie”, but as we can learn it while watching the DVD’s special features, the movie was competing at the Cannes International Film Festival. As opposed to what we might believe, this movie is graphically more explicit because of the high presence of violence in this flick and the violence also gives to the movie its sombre tone. This appalling form of violence doesn’t necessarily produce spectacular action sequences, but rather simple, realistic and often-gory action scenes that are meant to terrify the viewers.

This way of terrifying people actually works for David Cronenberg. Evidently, these action scenes are definitely not meant to entertain people, but rather to plunge us into something deeper. While Canadian movie director Atom Egoyan was able to wonderfully launch us into the characters’ mind in his flamboyant and provocative movie Where the Truth Lies by shooting erotic scenes with a startling visual accuracy, David Cronenberg, on the other hand, manages successfully to plunge us into the characters mind by shooting scenes of violence in a very realistic and rough way. The movie is so realistic that action scenes are not glamorized with slow motions just like in John Woo’s movies such as Face/Off. The study of the main characters’ complex psychology can be seen through their act of physical and (sometimes) verbal violence. In A History of Violence, David Cronenberg gets interested to what is really going on in the characters’ mind.

In order to do that, Cronenberg’s admirable directing style provides to the actors the ability to make their characters reveal their feelings without necessarily verbalizing their traumatizing thoughts. While they’re not using words to explicitly tell the viewers their state of mind, the main characters, through their eyes, help us to understand their psychological depth. This kind of stylistic expression reminds us of Asian movies, but as opposed to what we’ve already seen in some Asian movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the construction of the psychological analysis, based on what the characters’ eyes are revealing, hopefully don’t bring us into subjective or ambiguous interpretation since A History of Violence is a movie that is quite easy to understand.

Obviously, I was trying to say that during the whole movie, the characters’ feelings shown through their eyes can be very easy to construct in our subjective analysis, but what most people won’t like is the fact that A History of Violence ends just like a typically Cronenberg-style ending. The ambiguous ending certainly leave more questions than we believe since it doesn’t necessarily give a final answer about the main character’s (which means Tom Stall, who is played by Viggo Mortensen) psychological evolution. It’s really up to the viewers to guess if Tom Stall has return to a situation of balance that we saw at the beginning or if he’s still in the psychological zone of tensions created by the characters that changed his life. The storyline’s ending doesn’t provide us an answer, but according to what we see in the ending, it’s almost easy to tell what Tom is really feeling.

In A History of Violence most of the characters have their own history of violence. As Tom Stall, the man who is going through an identity crisis after he has killed two robbers at the beginning of the movie, Viggo Mortensen (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) really delivers a top-notch performance that is very memorable. Mortensen really seems to understand Tom Stall from inside and outside so that’s why it’s so easy for the viewers to feel what Tom is facing. Tom is just like a volcano, at one moment he’s really calm, but at certain moments, he’s rather animated by violence. Thus, most viewers won’t have any difficulty to identify themselves to Tom (although it’s not really recommended to do it) because of all the nuances that Mortensen brings in his impeccable performance. Furthermore, all the supporting actors are so solid, but let’s just say that Mortensen is really well supported by Maria Bello, as Edie Stall (Tom’s wife), Ed Harris, as Carl Fogarty, and William Hurt, as Richie Cusack, if we want to be concise.

Finally, even though David Cronenberg personally labels his movie as a “commercial movie”, we can say that his statement is partially true, but A History of Violence globally seems to be influenced by Cronenberg’s previous work in the cinematographic category of “cinéma d’auteur”, because the movie’s gruesome graphic realism almost plunge you into a social environment that you don’t want to live in. As a result of that, A History of Violence must be regarded as a thought-provoking movie and not a movie meant for entertainment.

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