In a 2005 interview at the opening of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Viggo Mortensen said, "I've been in probably forty movies... [and this is] probably the one I feel the best about. The most satisfied with." At the time, the words were startling from the man who was still the brightest new star in our cultural zeitgeist, the face of Aragorn himself. He was speaking specifically of the true collaboration onset between director and cast to enhance the final storytelling, but there is a second sense in which the Cronenberg film could be considered a better one than Peter Jackson's magnificent Lord of the Rings trilogy: LOTR may have been the perfecting culmination of a particular cinematic tradition, but History is a real maverick. You'd be hard-pressed to find its like, in Hollywood or elsewhere.
Michael Haneke rather famously made Funny Games to berate (sorry. To educate, I meant to say) us unthinking, slobbering American audiences who roar with pleasure and bloodlust at ultraviolence onscreen. Then he made it again, in English this time, using recognizable Hollywood faces in an attempt to reach those of us who are so brutish and slobbering that we obviously were not going to sit through anything with subtitles. Like some red-faced televangelist hollering from a pulpit that you're a sinner and going to hell, this type of cudgelling harangue is probably going to raise more sniggers than awareness, and I doubt anyone but the choir was converted. This ground abuts the slippery slope which Cronenberg is mining: instead of wagging a pristine finger at the bloodlusters, he looks instead to those of us who purport to abhor violence, and asks very reasonably just how firm our convictions are in that area. He does it insidiously and successfully, opening up our ethical shadow-places with a neurosurgeon's precision accuracy and leaving us with some intensely uncomfortable self-examination to do.
History is extraordinary even from its opening moments: locusts drone and the camera moves listlessly across a ramshackle motel facade as we watch two evil men, a serial-killing twosome, emerge from their room. They move as listlessly as the camera, heavy with heat and moral ennui. One lights a cigarette and, chillingly, pauses to straighten a chair with the same impassivity with which he is about to kill a child. These are not just killers, but men so entirely without empathy and conscience as to have approached a near-zombie state. Even the high school bully who prides himself on toughness slinks away from them at a look. They radiate evil and lethargy. The only thing that brings them into any sort of life is when they besiege Tom Stall's cafe at closing time, seeming to feed and grow strong on the terror they arouse. One of these characters is played by Stephen McHattie.
He's an old hand at villains, McHattie is; he has a genius for them, and Cronenberg exploits it. When McHattie's Leland barks that he wants coffee, terror fills the room. I swear to God, it's the sound of civilization's tenuous veneer falling with a thud to reveal the ravening beast behind it. Nobody who's watched McHattie's previous powerhouse baddies will be surprised by the forcefulness at his command. The abominable druglord Whitehale in 1987's Caribe comes to mind, who throws the heroine around by her bra and whose recurring signature coda is "Fuck me in the heart." It might sound like comedy on the page, and the movie is a third-rate thriller at best, but with McHattie in Whitehale's shoes, the character comes across like an Act of God in the term's most negative and devastating sense.
So the black-hats take over the diner, whereupon Mortensen's Tom Stall leaps into action and emerges a hero... and the conversation is begun. How much violence is OK? Cronenberg asks. Is it OK to kill a little girl? no? then how about this: is it OK to kill two men while defending innocents? yes? alright, then, what about a nice kid beating the crap out of the kid who's been bullying him all year? still OK? And on it goes, acts of violence that garner our approval all the way up to Tom Stall's really brilliant killing spree, complete with snapping necks and welling blood and holes in the head, and there's Cronenberg watching us cheer him on (and we do, we do; how can we not?), saying, "So that much violence, that's still OK, then? Under certain prerequisite conditions, of course?"
Cronenberg has said his goal in casting a role is to find the guy of whom people will later say, "Nobody else could've played that." He's succeeded in that with Viggo. Not only is he one of those rare actors who we find ourselves liking both as villain and hero, but he has entered the realm of the mythical for us. One of Cronenberg's subtle, masterful touches, one that grasps us firmly by the scruff of the subconscious to lead us around, is in the music. Early on, before we know about Stall's complexities, composer Howard Shore gives us a noble, melancholic theme (what is that noble-sounding instrument, a bassoon?) reminiscent of LOTR, which Shore also scored. Inevitably we are reminded that this is Aragorn, the hero we trust above all others, and so are more apt to follow him in his subsequent twisting trail of misidentities and gathering uncertainty.
When I first saw it in the theatre, I was full-on flummoxed for the first half hour. There was that initial, doom-laden introduction to the killers, but then we flash straightaway to the Stall family, with whom we spend most of the next twenty minutes in a state of cloying, unalloyed sweetness culminating in an embarrassing let's-pretend-I'm-a-cheerleader sex scene. Had I been in lesser hands than Cronenberg's, I might have lost faith and left early, trudged home to wash the treacle out of my soul. In subsequent viewings, I can see the set-up is perfect. Our introduction to the Stalls is in the little daughter's bedroom, who has just had a nightmare and everyone gathers to reassure her: there are no monsters, daddy says, and big brother tells her to leave the light on because shadow-monsters are scared of the light. It's almost too simplistic, but there's no question we're in the midst of people who have banished darkness too entirely from their existence, and as any qualified Jungian will tell you, the dark gods of the psyche will not stay banished indefinitely. There is always a balance demanded, a teind to be paid for the light. By the film's end, the pendulum has swung clear over into the dark and is (perhaps) coming back to rest in a more profound, fuller way of life. Even in the midst of the darkness, a new health and vigor can be seen in the infamous staircase sex scene, violent and bruising but mutually passionate, for my money one of the best scenes of sex ever filmed.
This is one of McHattie's best, one of Cronenberg's best, one of Mortensen's best. Not to be missed.
MOVIE: 5 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 5 stars
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