By D.K. Holm
October 3, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
The Dead Zone
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
Violence is closing in on us. On all of us.
The news emphasizes violence. A hopeless, sectarian violence that seemingly has no solution. The newspapers emphasize violence, of both man and nature. Sometimes with man conspiring with or exploiting nature. And the streets are more violent.
Within a three-block radius of where I work there have been two attempted rapes, three shootings, five stabbings, and a fire. In one of the stabbing incidents, three people were knifed in one go, the girlfriend of the stabber, and two people who sought to come to her aid. Four blocks from where I live, a guy was stabbed and died on the front porch of a house where he crawled to find help. On the mass transit train that runs through the city and which is presumably safe, there have been murders, in one case a man beaten to death by three youths using a two-by-four as a weapon. A few days ago three people attacked a train security guard. No one came to the guard's aid.
Just this last Saturday I was harassed on the street by a guy demanding my money. I got off the bus, and instead of going into a music store called Music Millennium I frequent for used DVDs, I decided to walk straight home. Would that I had made that choice. I turned the corner, passing an MM emp enjoying a cigarette, and saw at the end of the block a street punk in a brown coat, a knit cap, and expensive earphones. The headphones are a key point, because though this guy was 40 feet away he was already yelling at me, "Give me a dollar. I want a dollar." Now, usually in this town you can't go two blocks without someone asking for money. But he wasn't asking, he was demanding. He tried to block my path and menace me. When I refused to give him money and skirted around him he hurled vile, aggressive, threatening epithets (as usual with the street beggars, supplication quickly turns to rage). He then harassed the MM girl on the sidewalk and when she spurred him and tried to get away he turned the corner and presumably went down the street to continue his crime spree.
For the next 12 blocks it took me to walk home I was in a rage. I wished I'd had the guts to attack that guy when he was right next to me, his brown broken teeth and smelly breath right on me. I wished I'd had an umbrella with which to puncture his neck. I wished I'd had a gun to pull out and point at him while say, "I have a dollar for you. I have a dollar for everyone like you." I was agitated and filled with bloodlust. In that state of mind I would have shoot and killed him if I could, as revenge for him making me feel afraid and weak, and as revenge on everyone who had done that, on a weekly basis for the last 20 years as street crime and general beggary has increased. In that state of mind I would have gladly killed the guy and laughed as he bled to death.
This is not me. I have never struck anyone in my life, never been in a fistfight. In fact, I'm a coward. I'm sure that if I did strike that guy either something horrible would go wrong or I would feel terrible about it later, or both. But the streets have coarsened me. I fantasize about taking karate classes in order to defend myself and learn courage. I dream of learning how to become a killing machine from some elite team. Instead I slump my shoulders and watch more movies, and stream with rage and frustration. Meanwhile, the street guy is still out there, laughing, threatening more people, living and profiting off the fear of ordinary people.
That strikes me as unjust. But is there justice in this world? In reality, that guy was a miserable piece of street scum who leads a terrible life and will no doubt soon end up in jail or the morgue. And maybe in some way that's where he wants to be. I should be laughing at the situation, not letting it get to me, not let it come to symbolize all the assaults and remarks and terror the streets hold these days. And would I really be all that happy as a killing machine?
That's the theme of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, which I saw the next day. Or at least that appears to be the theme. David Cronenberg's new movie is an adaptation of the John Wagner (writer) and Vince Locke (artist) graphic novel from the 1997, published by Pocket Books in the same series that included the big-screen-destined THE ROAD TO PERDITION. The others in the short-lived Paradox Graphic Mysteries series were Tom DeHaven and Robin Smith's GREEN CANDLES and Wagner and Alan Grant's THE BOGIE MAN.
 |
 |
 |
Although I think I recall GREEN CANDLES as my favorite, all of the books had great premises. Like ROAD TO PERDITION, which is unofficially based on the LONE WOLF AND CUB series, VIOLENCE also has an unstated Japanese progenitor, A DISTANT CITY FROM SPRING (Haruka naru yama no yobigoe), a SHANE-like story from director Yôji Yamada in 1980 and starring Takakura Ken (I haven't seen the film yet but have this on good authority). In Wagner's story, Tom McKenna is a middle aged, bespectacled café owner in Raven's Wood, Michigan, who plays on the local softball team and is a pillar, though modest, of the community. One night two Dick and Perry style hoodlums on a spree stop into the diner to rob it. Tom fends them off with a surprising display of martial skills. His face plastered all over the news, Tom soon receives a visit from an aging New York City Mafioso named Torrino and his two underlings. Torrino calls Tom "Joey" and shows him the pinky finger in a jar he has been holding onto for 20 years. Tom indeed is missing his pinky finger. Tom assures his wife and the young local sheriff that the mobsters are confused. But the gangsters harass Tom's wife and kids and then kidnap his son Buzz, who bears a striking resemblance to the young Joey of two decades earlier. In a shoot out at Tom's farm, Tom kills the underlings, and his wife Edie wounds Torrino.
That's part one of three. Part Two has Tom fessing up to Edie that, yes, he is Joey Muni, and she accepts this new information reasonably equitably. He gives her and the reader the back-story. As a kid in New York he helped his friend Richie avenge the murder of Richie's bother Steve, who has slain by mobsters. They buy guns from a survivalist in the woods and pull an, at first, successful heist on the gangland figures. But when the hoods track them down, Joey gets away, sans finger, after half blinding Torrino. In the final part, the New York family kills Torrino in his hospital bed, and Tom gets a lawyer who proceeds to negotiate with the NY courts, and Tom gets a call from a feeble voiced Richie. Eventually, while back in NY, Tom is compelled to face his enemies. He is lured to an old warehouse, where the gangsters have kept Richie all these years, strung up legless and armless, blinded and tortured by his unbelievably cruel foes, led by crime boss Manzi. Tom has a close call but manages to turn the tables on the gangsters and in an act of euthanastic pity puts Richie out of his misery. Edie unites with the wounded Tom and he assures her that it is "all over."
I go into details about the source plot because Cronenberg and credited screenwriter Josh Olson (THE PERFECT HUSBAND/INSTINCT TO KILL, INFESTED, and the forthcoming UNTIL GWEN) have made significant changes while streamlining the plot, not all the changes for the better.
 |
It's now Tom Stall (and Joey Cussack, played by Viggo Mortensen), who appears a lot younger and more fit than his comic counterpart. His son is now Jack (Ashton Holmes), who has an ongoing feud with the school bully Bobby (Kyle Schmid). Edie (Maria Bello) is no longer just a hausfrau but also a lawyer in or near their town of Millbrooke (some reviewers have it in Indiana, others in Ohio). The gangsters are Irish and, led now by Fogarty (Ed Harris), come from Philadelphia. Richie (William Hurt) turns out to be Tom/Joey's brother, now high in the crime hierarchy and needing still to eradicate Joey as a sign of good faith to his criminal masters. The final confrontation is much different and the dinner table coda is not in the source.
Like the book, the movie begins with an incident, greatly changed, in which the spree killers are shown to be ruthless. They really are scary, but audiences have laughed at the opening sequence in which one of the two killers uses his car to drive something like 12 feet. This might make viewers take the idea that the film is meant to be funny, and apparently Cronenberg has told some interviewers that the film is one of dark humor, though it certainly didn't come across thus to at least one viewer.
 |
I haven't read many of the reviews for A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE yet, but I do at least get the idea that the film is a source of mild controversy on at least three fronts; one that HISTORY doesn't seem much like a Cronenberg movie; two, because of its two sex scenes, which some have said (unbelievably) go on too long. It turns out that American audiences are not used to R rated films actually having sex in them. But the two scenes play key roles in developing the characters. The first has Edie dressing up like a cheerleader and seducing her husband, who ends up in a 69 with her. I don't know about others, but this scene, along with our first sight of the Stall family, which is gathering around their youngest who has awoken from a nightmare, tells me that the Stalls are a near perfect family, two legitimately loving parents, who also have a full and still active sexual life. This is the "perfection" that first the spree killers and then the Philly gangsters come to disrupt, revealing that in large part the marriage of perfection is founded on a lie. The sex scene on the stairs is a different kind of sex scene, in which Edie's desire is inspired by her anger and her rough treatment at the hands of her husband, which both excites her and then sickens her. The third reason concerns the seemingly non-conclusive ending (though it didn't seem so to me).
 |
The movie diverges most from the novel in establishing the motivations for key characters, but in disastrous ways (though don't get me wrong, I love the film). While simple, the novel is very clear about the motivations of its characters, perhaps too clear, as the movie's writers have seen fit to excise most of the backstory. In the book, both Edie and the Jack equivalent are not necessarily disturbed when the father of the house turns out both to be someone else but also adept at defending his family and business. In the book, Edie is questioning, but finally accepting of her husband's explanations and supportive of him. When the film's Edie finally grasps that Tom is someone or something else, something outside of her experience she … pukes. Vomits in dismay at the shattering of her perfect world. True, the movie takes the position that Edie is overreacting; in this sequence, the film is clearly sympathetic with Tom's struggle to change, to become another person, to "bury," he says, Joey, as if that person he was in the past were truly another, physical person covered up or hidden somewhere. I am guessing that the film offers up this tortured and under-motivated character arc for Edie so that it can get to the ambiguous ending.
 |
Jack's dismay at his father's true self is particularly unclear. But then movies these days are not very good at portraying teenagers (TV shows are much better at it). Here Jack is a pouty, angry kid who seemingly wants his dad to be something else that he can't begin to define but which neither Tom nor "Joey" seem to fulfill. It seems that at first he was angry that his dad was something of a wimp, which was making Jack a wimp; then he is mad because his dad has a violent streak. In a really dumb scene Tom returns home (by cab, significantly) after a second bout with violence and Jack, who has been waiting and waiting and waiting for him stands up, criticizes Tom, and then runs off. Do real teenagers do this shit? Jack's rage seems utterly un-, or under-motivated.
 |
It's momentarily interesting to compare HISTORY OF VIOLENCE to Arthur Penn's TARGET (Paramount, 1985, $114.95, Tuesday, June 4, 2005), whose narrative is also based on the premise of a son (Matt Dillon) learning that his formerly fuddy-duddy dad (Gene Hackman) is in fact a well-trained spy and killer. Penn and his credited writer (Leonard Stern) are at pains to make the son's dismay over the first version of the father palpable and believable and his growing awareness of dad's capabilities inspire mixed but plausible and not contradictory reactions. The thrust of Penn's movie is to move the family to the "perfection" of HISTORY's opening sequence.
One reason for the change in Jack is to flesh out his character in order to create a parallel storyline about his woes with the bully Bobby. One, this story line sets up the fact that there are hierarchies in bullies; Bobby backs down instantly when he confronts the superior force of the spree killers, whom he almost runs into. Second, this thread contributes to a quasi-Darwinian thesis that a capability for violence is inheritable, shown when Jack takes out Bobby and his pal in the high school hallway. This wrestling with one's own identity may be the motivation for Jack's ire, but again it isn't clear.
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is deliberately paced and some might find it boring, while the scenes of violence are fully satisfying in an old time movie sort of way. There are little touches that are priceless, such as the bruises, caused by their tussle on the staircase, we see on Edie's back when she is shown crying in bed. And few people (Antonioni, maybe) shoot cars as well as Cronenberg, a true car lover (there is a great shot of Fogarty's limo pulling away from the town sheriff). But is it a comedy? Parts of it are amusing. William Hurt is funny in his scene, but Hurt's humor is not "ironic" or satirical or at the expense of the movie or the character or of Tom's character or values. Its humor is stitched into the narrative. If Cronenberg says it is a comedy, well, that's disturbing on one level if he thought he was satirizing or mocking classic American values, because it shows a disjunction between the artist and his understanding of his own work. But trust the tale not the teller: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is a great movie, despite what he says about it.
 |
It is a Cronenberg movie? The film does share some family resemblances with Cronenberg's other work. The film features brothers at odds as in DEAD RINGERS, the "brothers" aspect imposed by Cronenberg as among the many changes from the source. And the little Stall daughter (Heidi Hayes) looks like a member of The Brood. But the biggest similarity is the theme of a man fighting some inner element, a psychic or mental power, a desire, a disease, an invading element or a transformation, or as in this case an alternative self.
And rage (as in THE BROOD), which becomes a debilitating force. A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE slaked my bloodlust but its almost classical purity also pacified me. I just almost no longer want to murder that street thief. A few more movies of VIOLENCE's purity, and I may be cured.
On the new DVD of THE INTERPRETER, there is a feature called "Interpreting Pan and Scan vs. Widescreen" (5:08), in which Sydney Pollack goes into exhaustive detail about the differences between wide screen and full frame as they manifest themselves on the TV screen. This little segment becomes a screen against distorting the image to accommodate television (one wonders if this feature is also on the full frame version disc, released the same day; I guess that's where it really should be). Pointing at the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, Pollack says that those who watch the full frame version are being robbed of the visual information left out, that he intended the viewer to see.
Is a DVD box that says on the back that there is a full-length feature commentary by the director also robbing the consumer when it turns out that the commentary itself is almost ridiculously sparse? Fortunately, the marketers at Universal realized that it would be false advertising and so don't even mention Pollack's yak track on the box language. It starts out well, but then he pauses, and a few seconds go by and then a few minutes and then 10 minutes and you think, oh, he was only commentating on the first few minutes of the movie. And then his voice pops up again. And then silence. Acres of silence, like the African veldt. And then he pops up again. I am guessing that in this 128-minute movie, Pollack talks for about 15 minutes.
 |
It's not that Pollack has little to say. Some of the points he makes are interesting, or unexpected, such as his comment that one difficulty in designing longer action scenes is coming up with music cues that can be sustained for a long time. I wish there were more of that. In fact, I wish that he had addressed some of the problems with the film that I crabbed about in my original review of the theatrical release: poor motivation for the characters, obvious plot directions abandoned, a confusing presentation of the central character, ambiguous politics, and a wholly unsatisfying ending. In the end, it is not at all as good as other UN set or interpreter based film such as NORTH BY NORTHWEST or CHARADE.
 |
Some of the extras address some of these issues. There is an
"Alternate Ending" (3:00) that shows Kidman standing behind the film's main villain as he reads the names of the dead before the whole UN. This is supposed to be satisfying but I'm not sure how it would have been integrated into the finished film. In any case, test audiences banned it.
There is also a trio of "Deleted Scenes" (2:19). One of them shows Kidman and Keener talking in a car and Kidman asks the obvious question: is Keener's character in love with Sean Penn's? (Yes.). This answers an unexplained strain of the finished film.
Two of the featurettes are boilerplate: "Sydney Pollack at Work: From Concept to Cutting Room" (10:02) and "The Ultimate Movie Set: The United Nations" (8:03), which are conventional making ofs.
"A Day in the Life of Real Interpreters" (8:18) is the most interesting supplement, if only because it tells you stuff you didn't know, and because of the fascinating fact that Pollack is shown to not even know the details of his own movie (he says the language Kidman translates is Matoban, rather than Ku, a made up language that combines Swahili and another language).
THE INTERPRETER comes in an excellent widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced), and with a great sound (DD 5.1 in English, French, and Spanish, with English, Spanish, and French subtitles). It is a must have for Kidman fans, such as myself; I just wish it had been a better movie.
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
Not only that, I've got a new book coming out in October (fingers crossed) on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, October 12, at 9 AM.
COMING SOON:FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!
<
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
