The Bishop on A History of Violence
The Bishop has learned something from A History of Violence; though it is not about history, and it is certainly not about violence. Instead, your Anglican adjudicator has discovered one interesting fact about David Cronenberg.
Cronenberg, according to the special features included with the DVD, does not storyboard his projects; he likes to improvise. This is not to say he doesn’t use a script. But, once he has read, and liked, and, presumably, got his head around the thing, he simply turns up on set and works the rest out from there. This explains a lot.
Cronenberg is a director who might be quite good if he ever chooses to make it up before he goes along. As it is—and irrespective of his disinterest in putting people in his films—he is a director whose haphazard technique struggles with the concepts of space and time. Any filmgoer with a functioning eye will have seen the way he is forever cramming people into shot (even when there are not that many people to cram), but here it is the chronological gaps he over—and under—fills. As the picture opens, we watch two (murderous) criminals checking out of a hotel (why Cronenberg begins with this patently unnecessary scene the Bishop does not know)—one goes inside to ‘pay up’; the other, slowly, brings up the car (we stay with the second). Waiting for the first criminal to return, there is a sense of bloated delay—this scene—suspense-less, because we have no background, even if it is clear the pair are up to no good—is taking far too long. And yet, hearing the first thug tell the second that he had ‘a dispute with the maid’, one’s immediate sense is that there has not been near enough time to get into a disagreement and shoot two people in the head. This is but one example of many; at no point is the drama navigated, vitally or patiently, by a sense of pace.
Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) runs a diner in Millbrook, Indiana, and though the previews for the film will have already announced the contrary, we are asked to play along and think that that is all. One evening, the two aforementioned gangsters hold up the diner with intentions to kill; Tom, in an unexpected show of skilful violence, takes them out instead. His face now on the news, he is presently beset by more gangsters—bearing further ill—who believe he is Joey Cusack, a killer from their past. Is he? And if so, what does that entail? It is the task of the rest of the film to (partially) answer these questions.
It does not. There is certainly something to explore here, as thriller if nothing else (the Bishop doubts Cronenberg’s ability to make incisive social commentary; more anon), but there is not enough in this film to maintain any sort of tension, of either the dramatic or the psychic kind. Events unfold about as basically as they can; if one might imagine the ultimate mystery film, where every twist and turn is the last thing one expects, this is its opposite. And none of this is helped by the fact that Cronenberg, wanting to show us every attitude and skew on violence, really only demonstrates how much it turns him on.
There is a further lesson here, about the difference between the simple and the simplistic. Watching A History of Violence, your Anglican adjudicator was struck by the thought that Cronenberg—who the Bishop assumed had a hand in the script—should be writing comics. And what do you know? It turns out that A History of Violence was, originally, a comic. As an intermittent funnies fan, the Bishop knows rather too well the paucity of many modern, violent ‘adult’ comics; said writers’ inability to guide us through the grey minutia of life being rivalled only by their belief in their ability to do so. The idea of the grotesque creeping into the everyday was an old idea when David Lynch pretended to come up with it, and when it comes to delusions of one’s insight and originality, a scene in which Tom tells his young daughter there is ‘no such thing as monsters’, thirty seconds after another little girl has been cold-bloodedly shot, just about says it all.
There is some value in Cronenberg’s vision, but Josh Olson, adapting with ill-spent enthusiasm from the graphic novel, has no place writing scripts. His characters, his situations—particularly in his depiction of small-town life—and most of all his balsa-wooden dialogue—are about as fresh and sophisticated as those paintings of draught horses one is always seeing at community art fares. And even in this he gets it wrong (though Cronenberg is equally to blame); unsure whether he wants to point his ‘ironic’ pen at the muddy mundanity of everyday life, or at its faux–Hollywood innocence.
And yet, this is not a bad film. Perhaps it is Cronenberg’s fundamental cinematic talent—seeping, once again, through the cracks of his bovine intellect. Perhaps it is a previously undiscovered gift for staging action (ironic in the one film where Cronenberg cuts the violence quickly so as—in theory, anyway—not to glorify it) and Mortensen’s adept physicality (somewhere, it seems to the Bishop, between a sure-fisted boxer and an anxious whippet). Perhaps it is that the basic premise—is he Tom, or Joey, or both, or neither?—is intriguing enough. Or perhaps it is just that no moving picture featuring Maria Bello in that cheerleaders outfit could in truth be said to be completely wrong.
Monsieur Mortensen shall never be a genuinely satisfying actor—nor, though, is he a disaster. His difficulty is twofold. One: He has, of late, been cast in roles that are too big for him (though the Bishop struggles to imagine what he would do with the urgent necessities of a character part). Two: He is too busy thinking. Mortensen may be an intelligent man—even if his face bellies it—but he is stuck in the confusion between schizophrenia of surface and multifariousness of depth. At no stage is he ever really Tom Stall or Joey Cusack. Yes, he does affect a sort of transformation, but that transformation begins and ends with his face. And though, perhaps, a face is not a bad place for an actor’s transformation to be, we need something apart from Mortenson’s slightly grimmer, slightly more mechanical, slightly perplexed visage, as though we—and he—are watching his reflection in a broken mirror.
Fortunately, perhaps, there is no one in A History of Violence to show Mortensen up. Bello, clumsy, fails to finds the point to Tom’s wife, Edie, though she is sumptuous decoration as the perfect everywoman—which is to say that every man watching the film will probably want to fuck her. William Hurt is silly. And as to Ed Harris, he has never really seemed to understand what acting is, and probably never will.
Cronenberg, according to the special features included with the DVD, does not storyboard his projects; he likes to improvise. This is not to say he doesn’t use a script. But, once he has read, and liked, and, presumably, got his head around the thing, he simply turns up on set and works the rest out from there. This explains a lot.
Cronenberg is a director who might be quite good if he ever chooses to make it up before he goes along. As it is—and irrespective of his disinterest in putting people in his films—he is a director whose haphazard technique struggles with the concepts of space and time. Any filmgoer with a functioning eye will have seen the way he is forever cramming people into shot (even when there are not that many people to cram), but here it is the chronological gaps he over—and under—fills. As the picture opens, we watch two (murderous) criminals checking out of a hotel (why Cronenberg begins with this patently unnecessary scene the Bishop does not know)—one goes inside to ‘pay up’; the other, slowly, brings up the car (we stay with the second). Waiting for the first criminal to return, there is a sense of bloated delay—this scene—suspense-less, because we have no background, even if it is clear the pair are up to no good—is taking far too long. And yet, hearing the first thug tell the second that he had ‘a dispute with the maid’, one’s immediate sense is that there has not been near enough time to get into a disagreement and shoot two people in the head. This is but one example of many; at no point is the drama navigated, vitally or patiently, by a sense of pace.
Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) runs a diner in Millbrook, Indiana, and though the previews for the film will have already announced the contrary, we are asked to play along and think that that is all. One evening, the two aforementioned gangsters hold up the diner with intentions to kill; Tom, in an unexpected show of skilful violence, takes them out instead. His face now on the news, he is presently beset by more gangsters—bearing further ill—who believe he is Joey Cusack, a killer from their past. Is he? And if so, what does that entail? It is the task of the rest of the film to (partially) answer these questions.
It does not. There is certainly something to explore here, as thriller if nothing else (the Bishop doubts Cronenberg’s ability to make incisive social commentary; more anon), but there is not enough in this film to maintain any sort of tension, of either the dramatic or the psychic kind. Events unfold about as basically as they can; if one might imagine the ultimate mystery film, where every twist and turn is the last thing one expects, this is its opposite. And none of this is helped by the fact that Cronenberg, wanting to show us every attitude and skew on violence, really only demonstrates how much it turns him on.
There is a further lesson here, about the difference between the simple and the simplistic. Watching A History of Violence, your Anglican adjudicator was struck by the thought that Cronenberg—who the Bishop assumed had a hand in the script—should be writing comics. And what do you know? It turns out that A History of Violence was, originally, a comic. As an intermittent funnies fan, the Bishop knows rather too well the paucity of many modern, violent ‘adult’ comics; said writers’ inability to guide us through the grey minutia of life being rivalled only by their belief in their ability to do so. The idea of the grotesque creeping into the everyday was an old idea when David Lynch pretended to come up with it, and when it comes to delusions of one’s insight and originality, a scene in which Tom tells his young daughter there is ‘no such thing as monsters’, thirty seconds after another little girl has been cold-bloodedly shot, just about says it all.
There is some value in Cronenberg’s vision, but Josh Olson, adapting with ill-spent enthusiasm from the graphic novel, has no place writing scripts. His characters, his situations—particularly in his depiction of small-town life—and most of all his balsa-wooden dialogue—are about as fresh and sophisticated as those paintings of draught horses one is always seeing at community art fares. And even in this he gets it wrong (though Cronenberg is equally to blame); unsure whether he wants to point his ‘ironic’ pen at the muddy mundanity of everyday life, or at its faux–Hollywood innocence.
And yet, this is not a bad film. Perhaps it is Cronenberg’s fundamental cinematic talent—seeping, once again, through the cracks of his bovine intellect. Perhaps it is a previously undiscovered gift for staging action (ironic in the one film where Cronenberg cuts the violence quickly so as—in theory, anyway—not to glorify it) and Mortensen’s adept physicality (somewhere, it seems to the Bishop, between a sure-fisted boxer and an anxious whippet). Perhaps it is that the basic premise—is he Tom, or Joey, or both, or neither?—is intriguing enough. Or perhaps it is just that no moving picture featuring Maria Bello in that cheerleaders outfit could in truth be said to be completely wrong.
Monsieur Mortensen shall never be a genuinely satisfying actor—nor, though, is he a disaster. His difficulty is twofold. One: He has, of late, been cast in roles that are too big for him (though the Bishop struggles to imagine what he would do with the urgent necessities of a character part). Two: He is too busy thinking. Mortensen may be an intelligent man—even if his face bellies it—but he is stuck in the confusion between schizophrenia of surface and multifariousness of depth. At no stage is he ever really Tom Stall or Joey Cusack. Yes, he does affect a sort of transformation, but that transformation begins and ends with his face. And though, perhaps, a face is not a bad place for an actor’s transformation to be, we need something apart from Mortenson’s slightly grimmer, slightly more mechanical, slightly perplexed visage, as though we—and he—are watching his reflection in a broken mirror.
Fortunately, perhaps, there is no one in A History of Violence to show Mortensen up. Bello, clumsy, fails to finds the point to Tom’s wife, Edie, though she is sumptuous decoration as the perfect everywoman—which is to say that every man watching the film will probably want to fuck her. William Hurt is silly. And as to Ed Harris, he has never really seemed to understand what acting is, and probably never will.
posted by Salisbury at 5:04 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home