A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
Imdb
Date Watched: 03/25/2020
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: The Personal Recommendation Hall of Fame, I'm guessing Cricket?
Rewatch: No.
*Possible Spoilers Ahead*
Before yesterday, I had only ever seen one David Cronenberg film:
Maps to the Stars. That film is bizarre, unsettling, and darkly funny but in ways that are quite different from
The Fly. So going into
A History of Violence - and knowing next to nothing about it other than that it is also a Cronenberg film, I was kind of expecting something that was also bizarre and darkly funny.
That's not what I got. Instead I got a taut drama about a family man whose unsavory, secret past catches up with him when an act of heroism brings him unwanted media attention and he is recognized by people he'd long left behind. There's no humor in this film and the story is fairly straight forward, but - like the other two Cronenberg films I've seen - it is an unsettling watch. Viggo Mortensen turns in a strong performance the film's protagonist, Tom - a man who is at once a dedicated family man and a brutal, skilled killer with ties to the mob. He is complex and colored in many shades of gray and that's how I like my characters to be.
But as much as this film has going for it - and it has a lot going for it - I did not love it. For all Mortensen's efforts, his character came across as little too stoic for me to develop a strong connection and thereby become truly invested in his fate. But, however tenuous it may have been, there was some connection for me here and I'll probably revisit this at some point.
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