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Sept/Oct 2005:
David Cronenberg's A History of Violence by Amy Taubin
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FILM COMMENT
JULY/AUGUST 2005
Above: Princess Raccoon
CANNES: PATERFAMILIAS Page 2
It was the Americans who couldn’t fathom the Cronenberg, and neither could the jury. While it’s difficult to say what Kusturica and company made of Hou’s Three Times, the report was that all but one (Benoît Jacquot, who said as much in a series of post-Palmarès interviews) found A History of Violence to be just another overheated Hollywood revenge melodrama with comic elements and Viggo Mortensen in the Steven Seagal role. Thus the two greatest films in competition went unrewarded. Not that it matters much. The mastery and confidence known by Hou and Cronenberg (and only a very few other filmmakers around the world) are their own rewards. Cronenberg’s detractors and qualified admirers tagged Violence as a classical Western redux with a patina of Rockwellish Americana. True enough, but iconography isn’t everything. Every shot, action, and reaction counts, every layer of familiarity leads to a deeper level of unfamiliarity, and this loose adaptation of John Wagner and Vince Locke’s graphic novel finally lands a million miles from Unforgiven and far closer to Dead Ringers or Crash.
Mortensen is Tom Stall, happily married father of two in an “idyllic” Indiana town, where he runs the local diner and where any parting is apt to end with “See you in church.” When two murderous thugs (Jason Barbeck and Stephen McHattie) take over his diner at closing time, he dispatches them with a few economical moves, and is proclaimed an American hero. Soon he is shadowed by a disfigured mobster (Ed Harris—the most reliable actor in movies?) who insists that the guy behind the counter is not Tom Stall Family Man but Crazy Joey Cusack Out of Philly. On paper, it does indeed look familiar: Eastwood’s Bill Munny, John Wayne’s dying gunslinger in The Shootist, and Shane are obvious forerunners. But here the gun is not forsaken but denied, its existence suppressed, and the resurgence of violence is not a response of last resort but a reflex waiting to happen, again and again and again.
“It was Joey Cusack who did that—not Tom Stall,” confidently proclaims Mortensen’s hero to his chagrined wife (Maria Bello). That Cronenberg doesn’t shy away from the comedy of his protagonist’s “split-personality” predicament is a testament to his supreme confidence. That he never envisions the Tom/Joey dilemma as an all-or-nothing proposition, but instead as infinite gradations of clarity and obscurity, lucidity and madness, is testament to his daring. Best of all, he refuses to play the old art-house game of self-righteously denying the satisfaction of violence. Nor does he shy away from its horror, as two judicious inserts of faces half-blown off and pulverized into a mass of palpitating flesh and bone attest. A history of violence indeed. And just when his hyper-clarity threatens to become oppressive (a fault of the early films), he allows his actors to take their scenes in fresh, surprising directions. Mortensen and Bello must have melded minds with their director. Taken together, their two sex scenes, before and after the reappearance of Joey, are among the finest passages in Cronenberg’s entire body of work. As for the ending, it is as penetrating and disturbing a question mark as the final shot of eXistenZ. This is not the feigned ambiguity of a Trier or a LaBute, but the genuine article—raw, undeniable, as relevant to the characters onscreen as it is to the viewers in their seats.
Cannes ended on an unexpected high note for those of us lucky enough to make it to the out-of-competition screening of Princess Raccoon. Seeing the 84-year-old Seijun Suzuki proudly striding into the cramped Salle Buñuel in a tuxedo at four in the afternoon was already exciting enough. That he was accompanied by his star Ziyi Zhang in a white evening gown sent this film critic into a state of delirium before the lights even went down. That the film was exhilarating throughout was the icing on the cake. A digital extravaganza in the vein of Moulin Rouge, Tears of the Black Tiger, and Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle, Princess Raccoon is just as inventive as Suzuki’s Pistol Opera. But where that film was turgidly free-form, this one is held together with a fairy-tale plot, and it soars from one eye-popping setpiece to another. For some, the salsa number was the high point; for others, the rap dance in flip-flops. Me, I was enchanted from start to finish.
© 2005 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
