A History of Violence (New Line Platinum Series)
by David Cronenberg
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DVD details
Actor: Ed Harris, Maria Bello, Viggo Mortensen, William HurtDirector: David Cronenberg
Brand: NLV
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 98 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-03-14
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Model: N10095
Studio: New Line Home Video
DVD Reviews of A History of Violence (New Line Platinum Series)
DVD Review: An artistic triumph of monumental proportions: An astounding work of Art rarely achieved in the American cinema.
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie as a metaphor of American society is to the art of cinema what a Miles Davis or John Coltrane composition is to music, or a Kaiga painting is to Japanese art, or an unexpected winning Bobby Fischer or Bent Larsen move is to chess. Its very power lies in the utter subtlety and understatement of its intrusive imaginative truths, and in the skill and necessity with which these truths are forced out into the open and acted out as an unerring narrative (or drama) about what lies underneath the human and the American condition. And what lies beneath it is the manifold terror of violence -- which is an enduring, ugly, almost inexorable existential subtext and leitmotif of the human - and especially of the American way of life.
There is no longer a need to get excited about violence in the U.S., for in its many and various sublimated forms it is to be found everywhere. We are trained not to see it but it is always there: in our national bloodstream, in our collective DNA, in our fantasies, in our passive-aggressive natures. All of its multi-layered, multidimensional, and hydra-headed components emerge and intersect in subtle ways in this movie. It is in our past, in our present, and sure to be in our future. It is the grim reaper of American society. The movie shows how violence stalks us from every dark corner of our consciousness. First it is far away and buried deep in our past; then it is close up, intimate, and then from out of nowhere it is suddenly "in our faces." It is in our homes, our cities and on our farms. There is no way to insulate ourselves from it, or hide from it. Indeed it is within us; it oozes from our skins. It is in our children heads. As domestic terrorists and meth-amphetamine labs, it is in our pastoral rural communities too.
With uncommon skill, depth and subtlety, this movie demonstrates that in the U.S., no one is ever far away from either the next "staged" or the next "random act" of violence. Our lives are centered on and shaped not by what we pretend is the main problem, "violence in the streets", but on how to avoid the structural violence implicit in the very American condition: The movie makes clear that the center of gravity of violence in our society is the passive aggressive violence closer to home in our own minds. Our conscious lives are no longer regulated by or animated by violent acts per se, but by how best to pretend there is no violence inherent in the American condition. And that, to the extent we are willing to admit to this at all, that we are animated by the lie that its cumulative historical impact on us, that is on who we are, and on our way of thinking and acting, and on our community as a whole, has nothing at all to do with how violent our society is, has become, and has always been. That is to say, it is about the continuing lie that past violence has no present day consequences.
We keep telling ourselves in so many different ways that all of this homegrown American violence is external to the American condition: that it has nothing to do with America's ugly accumulated history of violence. All these images of America being a violent land, is just so much anti-American propaganda working overtime. This image of us as being a violent nation is a mirage, a figmentation of overly active and fertile imaginations, a pure anomaly, an aberration completely alien to, and having nothing to do with the American condition. Yet, each morning, we cannot trust our own neighbors enough not to walk our kids to the corner school bus stop. To do otherwise is to risk the chance that they will be abducted, raped and murdered by the nearest local sexual predator. And oddly enough, the statistics bare us out on taking this profoundly prudent defensive measure.
As the movie underscores, every American instinct is an instinct whistling pass our own self-made graveyard, with one foot in a camp of colossal collective denial about how violence has not colonized our very existence; and the other attributing what violence there is to safe acceptable but far away targets -- "distanced" so that they do not contaminate our pristine thoughts of ourselves. It does not matter much that the character "Joey" or "Tom Stall" (superbly played by Viggo Mortensen), had a violent past, for as Americans, we all know that we too all also have a collective violent past, the one defined by the trail of violence left in the wake of our nation's violent history. To wit:
There is the unspeakable and psychologically still unresolved genocide against Native Americans, slavery and the still unresolved century of violence against the Negro (a half century of Apartheid and segregation, Jim Crow and lynching, and now voluntary re-segregation) that still shapes and animates the social lives of all Americans; a Civil War that the South lost on the battlefield but actually won in the hearts and minds of most white Americans, and which is still being fought just beneath the American consciousness, labor and race riots from the early 1800s forwards; two world wars, and a series of lesser ones -- from Vietnam to Panama and Grenada, and now on to Afghanistan and Iraq -- and the wars within the organized crime underworld that have become a signature of the American way of life.
Then there are the perpetual, unending wars: wars on drugs, on terror and on the poor, that is the class and culture wars; and of course within them, the war against abortions, the war between the rice and the poor, and always, the wars against the Jews and the Zionists. And then there is the war of the corporations against the rest of us - especially the oil and drug companies - not to mention just plain raw violence as in "domestic in-the-home-violence," continued racial violence, prison violence, and an annual crop of serial killers; street crime -- dope, whores, drive-by shootings, gang revenge, 7/11 stick-ups, mob violence and cop killings - an epidemic of sexual predators, killers and abductors, school, job and restaurants mass killings, and political assassinations, to name just a few.
America has not only been colonized by its own homegrown history of violence, but has been shocked into a perpetual fearful defensive state of existence. It has been defined and shaped by, then numbed by, and now collectively compartmentalized by, its casual ability to accept its own homegrown violence. Today, any political demagogue who can make 911 the predicate of a sentence, no matter how incompetent or illiterate, is surely to be elected U.S. President.
But even knowing that this is our history, the movie demonstrates with disturbing skill that somehow we still have learned to live in a cocoon of self-imposed denial, a virtual mental Potemkin village. We have trained ourselves to compartmentalize as Edie (Maria Bello) who played the role of "Joey's" wife, was forced to do. And thus we have become numb to the pervasiveness of the violence that is an integral part of us, and our ethos. As a nation, we have crawled into the fetal position, waiting to be rescued from ourselves by some imaginary moral hero. It seems we have no choice but to endure, deny and accept our lot; and then try to live through the denial of the knowledge that we have created the very incubator for our own self-destructive and violent society.
The great irony of U.S. society, which this movie draws out in the only way good art is supposed to do -- with great subtlety and understatement - is that we only become animated; act surprised; we only react when violence shows up uninvited (that is unforced from the subconscious) at the dinner table of a well-adjusted, white, suburban, middle-class, Middle American family. For instance, as the BTK killer did at the geographic center of America, Kansas, where not coincidentally the movie was situated. Or, as Ted Kaczynski did at the idyllic foothills of the Montana mountains. Or indeed as Timothy Mc Veigh did in the bombing of the Murrah Building "in out-of-the-way" Oklahoma City.) Otherwise "the violence that we see and (that we are)" ceases to be real to us.
After this subtle, understated, David Cronenberg movie, "The History of Violence," we no longer have the comfort zone of taking the national fetal position and waiting to be rescued. For those with the courage to see it, he has shaken and disturbed this nation's conscience to it very core. His art reverberated deep inside the brain. It is a scary truth that sticks there. It cannot be easily expelled, ejected or excommunicated.
The very act of raising this hidden truth openly -- especially about the cumulative violence of the past - will undoubtedly be seen, by those willing to see, as an unpatriotic betrayal of the highest order. Put simply, to admit to ourselves that our society rests on an edifice of violence, structural and otherwise that is then covered up by denials and lies; is to admit that violence is the only true and enduring constant in the American way of life. This, in the end, is an intolerable truth and an almost unbearable betrayal of the deepest held national unconscious secret. Yet it is a truth from which we can no longer recoil, shrink and then hide. It takes, not just an extraordinary artist, but a great artist, to be able to drill this message back into the brain-dead and morally challenged American conscience as David Cronenberg has done. One does not get hit with the full force of the message until long after he has left the theater: and then boom, like a ton of bricks you are shaken forever!
That important truths such as this, "that the psychological impact accumulated violence has had on the American psyche" can only be told through the most sophisticated and carefully coded art forms, shows in devastating relief how fragile the American way of life has become. Teetering as it does on a thin precipice of proto-Fascist political maneuverings and rumblings, self-styled hero worshipping, and on a thick veneer of pretend humanity, all of which is backup by state and societally-sanctioned violence or the threat of violence at every level, we are a nation rapidly spinning out of control and down into the vortex of full-scale Fascist-like tyranny.
Fear, but especially the fear of violence, is forcing us to eat our young, and to consume our own democratic institutions. From the purse-snatching ghetto thugs, to organized crime, to intimidation by crooked street cops, their rent-a-cop auxiliaries and security mercenaries, to sexual predators, and inner city gang violence, to law enforcement officers that are supposed to defend us -- such as the IRS, CIA, DIA, FBI, Homeland Security, etc. -- by home-grown criminals and terrorists, and ultimately by the American military, we are slowly and almost imperceptively becoming the police state we keep telling ourselves we are not. Strangely all of these agencies mandated to defend us from violence against ourselves, are more and more beginning to look suspiciously like Nazis in Halloween masks, salivating while anxiously awaiting with their attack dogs, high voltage tasers, hollow-point bullets and automatic weapons for the last democratic restraints to be stripped away.
This movie captures the full essence of the impact violence has had on contemporary American history both as it is played out "one random act at a time," and as its accumulates, and is encapsulated as systemic and structural violence over an embarrassingly long period of time. And it does so in a way that is so subtle, so deep, so stunning, so honest, so original, so moving, and so economical that it staggers the imagination into silence.
If there is a better American movie in history, I have not yet seen it.
Fifty stars!
Description of A History of Violence (New Line Platinum Series)
An average family is thrust into the spotlight after the father (Viggo Mortensen) commits a seemingly self-defense murder at his diner.DVD Features:
Audio Commentary:Director David Cronenberg Commentary
Deleted Scenes:Deleted scene w/director commentary
Documentary:"Acts of Violence" documentary
Easter Eggs
Featurette:"The Unmakeing of Scene 44" "Violence's History: U.S. vs. International Versions" "Too Commercial for Cannes"
On the surface, David Cronenberg may seem an unlikely candidate to direct A History of Violence, but dig deeper and you'll see that he's the right man for the job. As an intellectual seeker of meaning and an avowed believer in Darwinian survival of the fittest, Cronenberg knows that the story of mild-mannered small-town diner proprietor Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is in fact a multilayered examination of inbred human behavior, beginning when Tom's skillful killing of two would-be robbers draws unwanted attention to his idyllic family life in rural Indiana. He's got a loving wife (Maria Bello) and young daughter (Heidi Hayes) who are about to learn things about Tom they hadn't suspected, and a teenage son (Ashton Holmes) who has inherited his father's most prominent survival trait, manifesting itself in ways he never expected. By the time Tom has come into contact with a scarred villain (Ed Harris) and connections that lead him to a half-crazy kingpin (William Hurt, in a spectacular cameo), Cronenberg has plumbed the dark depths of human nature so skillfully that A History of Violence stands well above the graphic novel that inspired it (indeed, Cronenberg was unaware of the source material behind Josh Olson's chilling adaptation). With hard-hitting violence that's as sudden as it is graphically authentic, this is A History of Violence that's worthy of serious study and widespread acclaim. --Jeff Shannon
On the DVD
On a single disc and with little fanfare, this DVD makes an excellent case for the best extras of the year. Dive into the one-hour-long documentary and learn more about moviemaking than on many a double-disc. The secret lies in director David Cronenberg's (and his usual crew) folksy casualness in showing off the craft, be it makeup (green screens were used), directing (Cronenberg doesn't storyboard), or art direction (the diner set). It also is very funny to hear about "fish Fridays" and how Maria Bello's Uncle Pete became an influence. Even the infamous sex-on-the-staircase scene is diagnosed with candor as stars Viggo Mortensen and Bello act as if there is no backstage camera. There's only one deleted scene, but it's uncommonly deconstructed on why it was filmed and why it was cut (it's a very Cronenbergian dream sequence). A short bit on Cannes is also a delight. So much is here that Cronenberg's smart commentary track is nearly superfluous. Isn't that a nice surprise? --Doug Thomas
More to Explore
 The Graphic Novel |  Other Graphic Novels that Inspired Movies |  David Cronenberg Essentials |
 Why We Love Maria Bello |  The work of Viggo Mortensen |  The work of William Hurt |
Stills from A History of Violence
 Viggo Mortensoe as Tom Stall |  Ashton Holmes as Jack Stall and Kyle Schmid as Bobby Jordan |
 William Hurt as Richie Cusack |  Ed Harris as Carl Fogarty and Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall |
 Maria Bello as Edie Stall |  Director David Cronenberg |
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