The Maturation of David Cronenberg enters Stage II with the director’s A History of Violence which, along with Stage I offering (Spider), has seen the Canadian leap from shock-and-awe filmmaking (Crash, eXistenZ, Videodrome, etc.) to crafting something that can easily stand among the best pictures of the year.  It’s a little like the enfant terrible-to-auteur metamorphosis experienced by François Ozon as of late, only Cronenberg is about three decades further away from being l’enfant than Ozon is.

Distributed in wide release, presumably because its lead was in The Lord of the Rings, Violence is set in Millbrook, Indiana, where Tom Stall (Hidalgo’s Viggo Mortensen) is living the perfect idyllic life of Norman Rockwell-esque Midwest America.  His wife, Edie (Maria Bello), is devoted and hot, and his two children (Ashton Holmes and Heidi Hayes) are adorable and well-adjusted.  He also runs the town’s diner, which is where a pair of murderous thugs wander in and have an Oprah-at-Hermes kind of snit when Tom tells them it’s too late in the evening to serve them.  Words are exchanged, guns are drawn, and before you know it, Tom actually turns into Charles Bronson and wastes both of the baddies.

The incident and its subsequent media frenzy turn Tom into a reluctant hero, but they also draw the attention of Philly crime boss Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), who believes Tom is really an on-the-run-from-the-mob guy named Joey Cusack.  Like Henry Fonda in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, Tom insists Carl is simply confusing him with someone else.  Is Tom really Joey?  Is the partially blind Carl mixed up?  Maybe Tom has some kind of weird split-personality?  That’s for you, dear readers, to find out, though you should be warned that the titular violence is sporadic but pretty fricking unspeakable.

Violence’s story was adapted by art department underling-turned-screenwriter Josh Olson from the relatively sparse black-and-white graphic novel written by Judge Dredd creator John Wagner.  Olson adds some scenes that nicely aid the film’s character development, and others that don’t seem to do much other than pad the already-meager 96-minute running time.  The greatest injustice of all, however, is that Olson completely jettisons the novel’s second act and drastically re-writes the third.  Normally, this wouldn’t bother me too much, so long as the end-result was as enjoyable and well-realized as Violence is.  But, and this is going to be difficult to explain without getting into spoiler territory, the things that happen in the second act make Tom a much more sympathetic character, and their absence hinder the end result somewhat.

Cronenberg’s direction is as crisp as ever, beginning with a really nice opening scene: A five-plus minute tone-setter filmed entirely in one shot.  Mortensen, with graying hair and a soft-spoken voice, almost makes you forget about how much of a nerd Aragorn can really be (and speaking of tranquility, the whole production is surprisingly quiet, which only makes the spurts of violence that much more shocking).  The glue holding the picture together is Bello, whose range of emotions expressed as a result of Tom’s situation are the real driving force of Violence, and the best work I’ve ever seen from the Golden Globe/SAG nominee for the overrated The Cooler.

Violence reminded me a lot of Sam Mendes’ adaptation of Road to Perdition, mostly because both pictures were based on graphic novels about a family man from the Midwest putting the lives of his loved ones in jeopardy because of his (potential) involvement in Irish-led organized crime, but also in tone, as well (I won’t bother mentioning the uncanny connection between both movie’s “godfathers,” played by the father-son team from Empire Falls).  I do not, however, think mainstream audiences are ready for something like Violence, if the non-stop snickering (mostly at the unconventional opening, the hot but non-explicit sex scenes between Mortensen and Bello, and the finale) heard at my preview screening was any indication.  That this picture and Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist both open this week in multiplexes across the country speaks volumes about the current state of the film industry.

1:39 –

for strong brutal violence, graphic sexuality, nudity, language and some drug use