A History of Violence — The Mask Grows In

America’s favorite lie is that violence is a visitor. Cronenberg shows it holding the deed to the house.

A History of Violence starts in morning light on a motel forecourt, the camera sliding sideways at the speed of a man with nowhere to be. Two men grumble about checkout times and water for the road. The younger one strolls inside, past the front desk, and the room confesses one wall at a time: blood where the staff should be, and one small witness the film does not spare. David Cronenberg keeps the whole thing in a single unhurried glide, murder shot like a chore, and then he cuts hard to a little girl screaming awake in a happy farmhouse hundreds of miles away. That cut is the entire movie in one splice. The nightmare and the postcard were on the same reel all along.

The postcard is Millbrook, Indiana. Tom Stall runs the diner and knows his regulars by name. His wife Edie practices law. Their teenage son takes a bully’s taunts and calls himself a pacifist, and their little girl has nightmares her family can still talk her down from. It looks like a Norman Rockwell print somebody bled on, and the longer you sit with it the clearer it gets that the blood was always part of the picture. Cronenberg adapted this from the John Wagner and Vince Locke graphic novel, and he released it in 2005, right as the multiplex signed itself over to men in masks for the next two decades. It is his cleanest parable. Calm on the surface, sick at the joints. Its subject is the story this country loves to tell about itself, the one where violence is an interruption of normal life. Not here. Here it is plumbing. It runs under the streets, under the marriage bed, under the dinner table where the last scene will be served.

The hinge arrives when the two drifters from the motel walk into Tom’s diner at closing time. It begins as straight menace, a gun waved around, a waitress grabbed, and then the soft-spoken man behind the counter throws a pot of scalding coffee, comes over the counter, and kills both men in seconds. He moves faster than thought. Faster than the film has moved to this point, which is exactly the horror of it. Overnight he is a local hero, and the bell over the diner door starts to sound like an alarm.

Then the past shows up with a ruined eye and perfect diction. Ed Harris’s Carl Fogarty climbs out of a black sedan like a man collecting on a life the town never knew existed, orders coffee, and calls Tom “Joey.” The name lands on the family table like a loaded gun somebody set down between the plates. What follows is not a thriller about whether the mobsters have the right man; the film settles that question with unusual speed and moves on to what actually interests it, which is watching a family’s nervous system get rewired in real time. Maria Bello gives the picture its human tremor. You can watch Edie rereading ten years of her own marriage behind her eyes while her body tries to stay married, and it is some of the finest silent acting of the year. The son, humiliated one time too many, feels the breaker flip and beats the school bully halfway to the hospital, suddenly fluent in a language he swore he would never speak. Rage passes down in this movie the way property does, handed over with the house keys. And the marriage drops its own disguise on the staircase, where tenderness curdles into something feral and the film says plainly that love can be a raid. Cronenberg’s gift was never shock. It is aftermath. He shows you the bruise and then follows it into the bloodstream.

Viggo Mortensen devastates precisely because he barely appears to be acting. Tom Stall is an honest man with a perfect cover story, because the cover has grown into cartilage. Watch the micro-flinch when Fogarty says “Joey,” the way the smile drains out of the eyes first, like a tide going out while the mouth stays on shore. Peter Suschitzky shoots the Millbrook daylight like a sedative, a town glowing with a promise it cannot read the fine print of, and Ronald Sanders cuts the violence against every action-movie instinct in the book. It comes bluntly, with no buildup, and then it just sits there while the moral bill gets totaled, daring you to keep looking. Faces are wrong after death in this film. Wounds look like work. A dozen bodies drop across ninety-six minutes and not one of them is fun.

Where the film falls short of its own reach is Philadelphia. William Hurt’s Richie Cusack waits at the end of a long hallway of denial, and he plays the final reckoning as fratricidal black comedy. You can defend the choice. Cronenberg wants the mythic past to turn out small, petty, a kingdom the size of a den. But for roughly ten minutes the comedy lets air out of the dread, handing the audience the laugh the rest of the picture has spent an hour withholding, and the confrontation weighs less than the movie needs it to. The dinner table gets the weight back.

That last scene has no dialogue and needs none. Tom comes home from the thing he did. The daughter quietly sets him a place. The son, after a long moment, passes the food. Edie finally lifts her eyes, and the film ends before anyone can decide what to say. The scrape of a fork on porcelain says it for them: we will try to live with it, because that is what this country does. The twist of A History of Violence was never that a man is who he was. The revelation is that the mask does not come off. It grows in. Twenty years on, with the righteous-gun fantasy stamped out on every screen like currency, this stands as the great American movie a Canadian had to make, because he was the one director who never believed our favorite lie.