[1]1,724 words
David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (New Line Cinema, 2005) is truly a superb movie, with a tight and economical script (the whole story is told in 96 minutes), a remarkably subtle and gripping performance by Viggo Mortensen (his best ever, in my opinion), excellent performances from the rest of the cast, and an unostentatiously elegant directorial style (unmarred by the middlebrow pretentiousness and penchant for the juvenile and repulsive that ruin most of Cronenberg’s movies).
The hero of A History of Violence is Tom Stall, played by Viggo Mortensen. As the movie opens, Stall is portrayed as very much a White everyman. He is a family man with a wife (Edie, played by Maria Bello) and two children (Jack, played by Ashton Holmes and Sarah, played by...