A History of Violence (2005)
Directed by David Cronenberg
An average family is thrust into the spotlight after the father commits a seemingly self-defense murder at his diner.
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33 films that influenced A History of Violence
What critics say influenced A History of Violence
He could be Cary Grant in "North by Northwest," an innocent man forced by mistaken identity into a life-or-death struggle, or maybe he's Clint Eastwood in "Unforgiven," a reformed gunslinger who has retreated to the quiet life but finds he hasn't washed all the blood off his hands.
There are strong parallels between A History of Violence and Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning Unforgiven, in that both films examine once viciously violent men who have long since reformed, and have become domesticated family men, but who are eventually drawn back into their violent ways of old.
By degrees he insinuates the idea of violence as an inescapable destiny, redolent of Clint Eastwood's reformed killer in Unforgiven finding himself pulled back into the old ways.
Working from a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, screenwriter Josh Olson creates a modern-day parallel to all those classic Westerns (from "The Gunfighter" to "Shane" to "The Shootist" to "Unforgiven") in which world-weary gunslingers naively think they can hang up their six-shooters -- at least until, inevitably, their violent pasts catch up with them.
The modern apex is the vigilante Western Unforgiven, in which a return to bloodshed costs the hero his soul—but the higher price (for him and at the box office) would have been leaving his buddy unavenged.
As the movie opens, in a sequence that recalls the off-hand horror of John McNaughton's 1986 "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," we see a pair of vicious drifters making their way toward Tom's town with a stick-up on their minds.
More formally and narratively conventional than 2002’s Spider (or anything in the Canadian auteur’s oeuvre, for that matter), but nonetheless similarly preoccupied with bifurcated identities, personality reinvention, and the constantly shifting borderline between reality and fantasy, Cronenberg’s latest begins, like Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, with the arrival of two thugs at a Norman Rockwell-esque small-town U.S.A diner.
In an electrifying sequence that begins like the opening bravado-dialogue section of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” then escalates with the flaunting of a gun and the manhandling of a terrified waitress, the soft-spoken Tom hurls boiling hot coffee in one assailant’s face and springs over the counter to seize his gun, which he swiftly uses to kill both men.
Working from a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, screenwriter Josh Olson creates a modern-day parallel to all those classic Westerns (from "The Gunfighter" to "Shane" to "The Shootist" to "Unforgiven") in which world-weary gunslingers naively think they can hang up their six-shooters -- at least until, inevitably, their violent pasts catch up with them.
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In fact, 1955's At Gunpoint starring Fred MacMurray begins much the same way: Baddies ride into town to stir up severe trouble, only to be dispatched by the most mild-mannered guy on the block.
That Tom's teenage son Jack (Ashton Holmes) has pit-bull instincts - the scene in which he suddenly attacks the school bully is genuinely shocking - actually presses the argument further that violence might be genetic, a theme that transfused Paul Schrader's sombre father-and-son picture, Affliction.
Until recently, the violence has always stood apart from humanity, seeping into our pores from outside sources and poisoning the charactersâ lives in films such as Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers, and many more.
In Cronenberg's canon, it belongs in the same breath as The Fly and Dead Ringers.
Indeed, Cronenberg suggests, we might all have a Joey buried somewhere inside us, waiting to be loosed from his lamp.A History of Violence is, like so many Cronenbergs before it (The Brood, The Fly, Dead Ringers), a study in transference and transmutation, no matter those who have pinned it as an atypical effort.
For the past 25 years, he has pushed the envelope in films such as "Scanners," "Videodrome," "Dead Ringers" and his memorably nasty remake of "The Fly."
It’s Cronenberg’s best film since Dead Ringers and, as such, easily one of the best films of the year.
David Cronenberg, the director of such films as Dead Ringers and The Fly, has a reputation for being a little "out there."
A History of Violence, which was written by Josh Olson, takes its cue from a tradition of films — Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet among them — that use the iconography of the American Dream to lead us toward an American nightmare.
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Working from a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, screenwriter Josh Olson creates a modern-day parallel to all those classic Westerns (from "The Gunfighter" to "Shane" to "The Shootist" to "Unforgiven") in which world-weary gunslingers naively think they can hang up their six-shooters -- at least until, inevitably, their violent pasts catch up with them.
Loosely based on the graphic novel of the same name, "Violence" also seems to borrow some of its story elements from the French classic "The Return of Martin Guerre," in which a long-lost husband and father suddenly returns home to his family, much to the surprise of his wife, who isn't entirely certain he's the man she married years ago.