Cinema, 10 - A History of Violence [2005]
Having caught this film in the theater on release, I was seated next to a middle-aged couple, the woman to the left next to me and then her husband to her left. We made small talk before the lights dropped, but after that we were absorbed into our one little personal relationships with Cronenberg. At the moment during diner scene when Billy casually wipes his hand across the waitresses’ breasts, the woman shuddered so violently that her husband and I both involuntarily turned to look at her, and then I quickly back away realizing that this was far too intimate a second-order experience to share with the couple.
Cronenberg owns emotional violence, but ‘body-horror’ is really just a trojan horse to something more sinister: there is a way that he renders immanent violence that is so magnetic. It’s in the tone. Stylized, yes, but never giving way to the sort of sensationalism that diminishes its severity or undermines its impact.
This, the 1 of the 1-2 punch of Cronenberg's collaboration with Viggo Mortensen - the other being the masterful Eastern Promises [2007] - coming well after he solidified his status as malevolent auteur. His use of Mortensen is also rather brilliant - in both films he somehow manages to fuse sympathy with a pitch-black core. As for the violence, he just makes it weirder.1 And all the more potent when the drama is straight, Viggo’s eyes barely giving anything away.
Hell, even Charli XCX gets Cronenberg.
When the school bullies encounter the traveling mobsters in traffic is a moment of pure beauty: even incoherent violence can explode hierarchically.