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TORONTO -- Movies (well, good ones, anyway) often have signature motifs or images that essentialize what they're about: In Danis Tovanic's "L'Enfer" its the kaleidoscopic circle that suggests the Dantean realms of hell. In Michael Haneke's "Cache" and David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," the key recurring images are of doorways, which suggest the things that are hidden or compartmentalized -- in space and in time -- beyond what's actually visible or knowable within the frame.
Cronenberg's movie is a kind of sequel to his 1982 masterpiece "The Brood," another meditation on the legacy of violence one generation hands down to another. In the earlier picture, the violence was in the form of divorce, alcoholism, and repressed rage that took physical form as a kind of cancer. In "A History of Violence," it's the capability for actual physical violence that takes on a terrible immortality of its own, affecting one life after another.
I don't want to say anything more about the plot because I hate knowing virtually anything about a movie's story (the backbone of any narrative film, but also often the most superficially appreciated aspect of its structure). I want to talk about the doors instead.
"A History of Violence" -- like "Cache" (I agree with Roger that "Hidden" is really a much better English title) -- is about a man with secrets in his past -- and his present. The very first shot sets up the movie's spatial sense of time: Two men emerge from a motel room, they get into a car, pull forward to the office, and then one of them goes in to "check out." Life-shattering events take place in this single long, unbroken take between one opened door and another.
The film, based on a graphic novel, has a crackling sense of visual tension, with doors and the rooms beyond representing possible paths the story (the future) might take. Will somebody suddenly appear in that doorway and see something they shouldn't -- or bust through that door, out of the past and into the present? Is the person in the other room privy to what's going on in this one? Or is somebody visible through that door or window in someone else's line of sight -- or line of fire? Those are the questions that keep you on the edge of your seat.
Another of the movie's pleasures is the inimitable Cronenberg casting. The stars are terrific -- Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Maria Bello, Ashton Holmes and a special mention for William Hurt. But you see other faces in the nooks and crannies of Cronenberg movies that you would never find anywhere else. Take the strange blond henchman who shows up at Mortensen's house one day. There's just something disconcertingly off about him, and it's perfect. You've never seen anybody quite like him in a movie before.
The consensus among critics I've talked to is that this is one of Cronenberg's best films, and has a shot to be his most commercially successful since "The Fly." I'm no good at commercial predictions, but I know vintage Cronenberg when I see it. For a long time, I think David Cronenberg has been one of the most artistically daring and exciting filmmakers in the world. "Shivers" (aka "They Came From Within"), "The Brood," "Scanners," (the namesake of this blog), "Videodrome," "The Dead Zone," "The Fly," "Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch," "Crash," "Spider" -- for a quarter of a century he's come up with one dazzling, original vision after another, and "A History of Violence" incontestably ranks in their honored company.
