A History of Violence

 

Director David Cronenberg on the set

Cronenberg with Viggo Mortensen

Cronenberg with Mortensen and Monica Bello

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE                      A-                                                                             USA  Germany  (96 mi)  2005  d: David Cronenberg

This might be a good time to re-examine an earlier work of Viggo Mortensen in this David Cronenberg film.  One of the most versatile directors working in cinema today, pioneering the body horror sub-genre into the mainstream, finding subtext in the strangest places in order to uncover our true nature, typically depicted with a pronounced visual flair, earning a great deal of commercial success while exploring deeply unsettling philosophical ramifications.  His first Hollywood studio feature since the 1980’s, adapted from an obscure graphic novel, this may be the most mainstream film of his career, yet also one of the most subversive, both celebrating and deconstructing the American Dream.  The film was almost universally praised, listed as the #1 best film of the year by Amy Taubin from The Village Voice, Amy Taubin: 1987-2005 and J. Hoberman from The Village Voice in 2005, #2 by Cahiers du Cinéma magazine in 2005, and #3 by Jonathan Rosenbaum in 2005.  The Village Voice’s annual poll by critics and film writers named it the best picture of 2005 by the widest margin in their history, joining a long list of cutting edge directors who previously claimed this distinction, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001), Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004), with Cronenberg also named best director in the same poll, suggesting the film is part of the pervasive American culture.  Set in a small, predominantly rural, all-white community in Indiana, part of America’s heartland, which suggests an idyllic existence, or a place out of time, a town of “nice people,” according to the sheriff, but part of a delusional portrait of an idealized America, where the opening sequence exemplifies the director’s command of the medium, a masterful long shot that is all mood with a precise malevolent tone, including outrageous shades of dark humor, as Cronenberg does with this film what Eastwood failed to do in MYSTIC RIVER (2003), which is to establish, at the core of this film, believability.  A mix of postmodern sensibilities and arthouse aspirations, the film successfully straddles the line between a thriller and an art film, where it’s intriguing how Cronenberg wordlessly connects between characters as well as the audience, using complex layers that make it difficult to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, as many of the evil characters never cross the line of out and out criminal behavior, while many of the righteous and good characters do cross that line, yet for understandable motives.  The question is whether the lead protagonist can renounce violence and forge a new identity, with the film hinting he cannot, as his violent past comes back to haunt the present, reverting to his old ways to save and protect his family, where the primitive violence is very intimate and physical, with the viewing audience becoming complicit in the violence as well, as we identify with the emotional turmoil the characters’ face, which necessitates a kind of moral accounting for that desire for violence, becoming a snapshot of America coming of age in the shadows of violence, with Cronenberg holding a mirror up to society.  They appear to resemble the crises of ordinary people, especially as the attackers are so evil and callous, so we have to accept the consequences, though there are also indications that he has finally cleansed himself of that violence in order to be integrated back into his family, expressed through a family dinner scene, as he’s invited to rejoin the family for a classic Midwestern meal of meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  

With bad guys on the loose, almost in the abstract, the film changes gears and zeroes in on a typical loving family somewhere in small-town Indiana, where Tom, Viggo Mortensen, an aw-shucks everyday kind of guy who runs a Main Street diner, with Monica Bello as Edie, his loving and supportive wife, with two kids, a befuddled teenage boy Jack (Ashton Holmes) who is the victim of a high school bully in a letter jacket and what looks like a cute but over-pampered blond, curly-haired, 6-year old daughter Sarah (Heidi Hayes).  In this film there are no bizarre locales, and no over-stylizations, but it does express violence as an organic phenomenon, drawing on the Western and the gangster genres in order to achieve new levels of consciousness.  The rhythm of life is established and broken when the bad guys enter the diner and get their lunch handed to them by soft-spoken, mild mannered Tom, a stand-in for Clark Kent, who saves the day and is instantly turned into a reluctant hero, where the shift from hero to vigilante happens in an instant, as does the shift from professional killer to American hero, in this case viewed as one and the same.  We are reminded that women and children everywhere live with men who are killers, as they live with men who were soldiers, who did what they had to do during wartime.  Living with killers is not a difficulty, but only becomes troubling when that killing is not sanctioned by a larger purpose.  Mortensen is an actor who can play large or small with equal skill.  Amid a growing sense of paranoia and fear, causing him to remark at one point, “I think I’m losing my mind,” a strange tale of double identity is unfolding.  On the surface, he appears to be an all-American family man, allowing Cronenberg to exploit prevalent themes that occur throughout much of his work, namely, the way things appear can be deceptive, and the idea that normal conventions we use in our everyday lives can be highly dubious.  The director engages in philosophical questions of order and disorder, which can be unclear, especially in the context of our uncertainty in the world around us, yet there’s something deeply unsettling in the way Cronenberg shows how notions of deception can be tied to our own identity.  With various forces of deception undercutting the prevailing reality, Cronenberg makes us question ideas we have about who we are.  Despite his undesired popularity, more bad guys arrive in the form of Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), who is missing one eye, and attributes its loss to Tom, who he recognizes as gangster Joey Cusack from the old neighborhood in Philly, a revelation that exposes the monstrosity of his former life which threatens the stability of his marriage when Edie discovers who he really is, where this violent past continues to pose a threat lurking over the present even after the film is over.  Harris stalks him, very much like the high school bully that continues to pick on the son, until all hell break loose in each case, where the situation is resolved through unintended violence, but it gets the job done.  Or does it?  As there’s more bad guys where they came from.  Violence only leads to more violence, which sometimes seems like the only way, as without it, innocent individuals would continue be victimized and harmed, so at the very least, we understand and are willing to accept its place in our society, all precipitated here by seething male anger. 

Interesting that Cronenberg establishes some healthy marital sex, even after twenty years of marriage, which adds credibility to the vulnerability of the characters.  We see them when no one is looking, and they maintain their interest and intellect.  There are extended scenes of morally questionable sex balanced against extreme violence and death.  The complexity of Monica Bello’s performance is stunning, bewildered at the enormity of his deceit, remaining fierce and independent, yet she’s nearly raped by her husband with rough sex on the stairs, who turns into a monster to defend his family.  Again, this borders on rape, though the sex is consensual, despite elements of force, where we see her back is badly bruised afterwards, prompting Tom to ask jokingly, “What have you done with my wife?”  Turning into something else entirely, this movie is about an outsider suppressing the more grotesque excesses of his bloody past to fit into mainstream American life, where this newfound knowledge of her husband’s violent past unleashes new behaviors and emotions in her, which may as well be a metaphor for the film – unintended consequences.  As Tom has to come to terms with Joey, and all the ramifications of his so-called controlled violence, so too does his family and his town, as they’re all interconnected.  Summoned back to Philadelphia by his crime boss brother, Richie Cusack (William Hurt), who bluntly acknowledges “You’re living the American dream.  You really bought into it, didn’t you?” yet it is also a day of reckoning, in the very worst way, forcing him to deal with it in the only language the criminal underworld understands, extreme violence, which is jarring to say the least, but he didn’t exactly have much of an alternative, becoming a very real and unavoidable part of human existence.  This violent side disrupts the idyllic harmony of small town life in America, where everything is safe and good, a stark contrast to the violent lifestyle in the cities, where the apparent tension is a factor throughout the film, with both sides imperceptibly blending into one another without our noticing, offering redemptive possibilities.  The nauseating acts of violence are brutal, but not gratuitous, establishing the world as a dangerous place, and is juxtaposed against the innocence of Tom’s daughter awaking from a horrible dream with shadow monsters, which is clearly meant to subvert the world established by the film.  There is a brilliant and elegant pace and style throughout, economical and spare, without a single wasted frame, using Howard Shore music that sounds like Aaron Copland in Our Town, pure understated small town Americana, prideful, even heroic, yet mourning a faraway loss or regret, a reminder that death is a fundamental fabric of small town life.  An essential question this film asks is whether a person is allowed forgiveness for an immoral past after he demonstrates a genuinely reformed character and a willingness to live in society peacefully and even benevolently, but does not make legal reparations for specific crimes?  Cronenberg’s wordless interplay is astonishing, particularly at the end, which remains so ambiguous, played without dialogue, wondering who this man really is, questions that also gnaw at his family.  Is this film about the moral redemption of Tom, or about the moral downfall of his family?  More specifically, it asks us to consider the cost that must be paid to maintain the family as the moral center of the United States.  Americans have a long history of violence, suggesting we secretly crave what we publicly condemn, where the film may be less about forgiving and more about forgetting, questioning how many lies can we absorb to still remain true to ourselves?  

Eureka (2023)

 

Director Lisandro Alonso

Alonso on the set

EUREKA                   B                                                                                                                Argentina  France  Mexico  Germany  Portugal  Switzerland  Great Britain  (147 mi)  2023  d: Lisandro Alonso

The memory of man is uncertain.  There’s little difference between what you think you are and what you really are.                                                                                                                         —Maya el Coronel (Chiara Mastroianni)

Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Lisandro Alonso studied for three years at the Fundación Universidad del Cine, working as an assistant director and sound designer until making his first feature in 2001, founding his own production company 4L to produce his own films, where all of his features have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, including La Libertad (Freedom) (2001), Los Muertos (2004), and Liverpool (2008), aptly named the Lonely Men Trilogy, blending traditions of documentary with narrative film as each explores loneliness in the solitary lives of the rural poor by following a near wordless journey of isolated protagonists in remote regions who barely utter a word as they journey through unchartered territory that may as well be the end of the world.  One of the director’s interests is to confront the viewer with primitive ways of life that are as far removed from civilization as possible, where the mysterious world they live in becomes the central focus of the film.  Working almost exclusively with non-professional actors, he decided to work with Danish actor Viggo Mortensen in the historical drama Jauja (2014), set in 19th century Denmark and Argentina, exploring themes of eroticism and existentialism as it moves from a deadpan western into a hypnotic, trance-like odyssey, greatly enhanced by the lush color photography from Aki Kaurismäki’s cinematographer Timo Salminen.  Premiering in 2023 at Cannes in the Cannes Premiėre section, where it was overshadowed by all the press following Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), this film was shot in Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Mexico, where Alonso has discovered a new technique of superimposing screen images into dissolves that fade into new images, while continuing his practice of using long, uninterrupted shots, often in lengths greater than 7 to 10 minutes per shot, so this is a hypnotically slow film style.  Everyone talked about the frigid working conditions shooting Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015), as it was mentioned in nearly every review, but temperatures on this film got down to 30 below when shooting at night, regularly freezing the equipment, with Timo Salminen collapsing at one point, as his lungs shut down from the freezing cold, where he was taken away in an ambulance, replaced temporarily by Mauro Herce, so what was originally intended to be three weeks extended to two months, while also dealing with Covid protocols, but those same voices are silent here, which only accentuates just how subjective film criticism can be.  Reuniting with Viggo Mortensen in the opening segment, while also working with Chiara Mastroianni, who is like the reincarnation of Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), recalling the black and white cinematography of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), this film explores the ways in which Native people inhabit their specific environments, living in communities that remain marginalized, with limited access to resources and opportunities, frequently overrun by disillusionment and despair, creating an uncompromising portrayal of Native American life.  Spanning different time periods and continents, Alonso’s elusive and at times almost hallucinatory film is an extraordinarily rich, open-ended work of what the director describes as “uncertain conclusions,” perhaps exploring the space between dream and myth, brimming with ambiguous allusions and unexpected associations.  Like all of Alonso’s films, viewers are given a vaguely elusive idea of what we are witnessing, moving from genre to mysticism, featuring characters who have nothing to lose as they are so completely lost in themselves, given a dreamlike canvas to work with, aspiring to its own transcendence.    

For the second time following Jauja, Viggo Mortensen and Viilbjørk Malling Agger play father and daughter, captured in a heavily stylized, black and white Native American western along the Mexico and U.S. border in the 1870’s, drawing us into the imaginary world of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, which describes the violence of Western expansion and frontier life, the massacres that took place, and the utter absence of laws to protect people, with Mortensen tracking down his daughter in a lawless town where Mastroianni is the gun-slinging owner of a saloon filled with trigger-happy cowboys, drunken Indians, and half-naked prostitutes, shooting the men holding his daughter, only to discover an unexpected twist where what we are watching is a serial installment of a TV show being watched in contemporary times.  It’s a clever shift, traversing time and space, telling three different stories in three different times, suddenly finding ourselves on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest regions in America, a place Alonso has visited several times, but this is the first time he’s shot a film in the United States, which feels like a notable change, as he’s broadening his horizons while still maintaining his infatuation with isolated places and the toll it takes on those living in such remote places.  This is a fascinating study of a lone Native American police officer, Officer Debonna (Alaina Clifford), as we follow her while she meticulously makes her rounds on night patrol in the snow while regularly checking in with dispatch, which consists of the search for a child, the arbitration of a domestic conflict, traffic incidents, and a casino shooting, where reinforcements are not available, so the young woman has to improvise and adapt to overcome the problems alone.  It also simultaneously explores the life of her niece Sadie Lapointe, a young Native American woman who coaches high school basketball, yet is also guided by her grandfather’s tribal wisdom, able to achieve an altered reality, like something out of Carlos Castaneda.  The aching loneliness of life on a desolate reservation has never been more apparent, creating a disconnect and emotional void that simply can’t be filled, leading to alcoholism, drug abuse, inexplicable violence, and heightened suicide levels, which are more than double that of the mainstream population, and the highest suicide rate of any population group in the United States (The Issue of High Native American Suicide Rates).  Alonso tackles this subject head-on, refusing to shy away from the obvious discomfort, as it’s part of the challenge of living on a reservation, which is such a remote geographical region, literally cut off from the rest of the world.  Depicted with a raw honesty, Alonso adopts a near documentary approach, offering a searing observational realism that also takes us into the Amazon rainforests during the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1970’s, with elements of magical realism where a large CGI jabiru stork seems to transport us into the different realms, posing metaphysical questions about colonial influences on native peoples, establishing mysterious connections between the passage of time and the different cultures who have inhabited these remote regions, cut off from their traditions, where society today is not that different from what was going on hundreds of years ago, as tolerance for these cultures is no more accepted now as then, still having to deal with widespread violence, corruption, and ignorance.  In a time when there were no laws, the power resided with the fastest guns, which has now been passed on to those that make the rules or authoritatively sign the nefarious deals, suggesting not much has changed, calling into question the very idea of progress.   

Recalling Chloé Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2016) and 2018 Top Ten Film List #1 The Rider, both of which were shot on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, with the director living there for four years, yet also Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017), which was shot on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, Brooke Pepion Swaney’s 2022 Top Ten List #9 Daughter of the Lost Bird, which tackles the systematic adoption of Native children to outside communities, and Kent Mackenzie’s devastating urban portrait in The Exiles (1961), an early 1960’s film about American Indians adapting to the congested city environment of Los Angeles, which features an ungodly amount of alcohol consumption, where city Indians bring with them the same social issues from the reservation to the city.  Giving thanks to an international collective of independent voices like Roberto Minervini, Kelly Reichardt, Corneliu Porumboiu, and Dennis Lim, author and director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, this is about as far removed from the films of John Ford as you can get, literally redefining spaces that are generally absent from history and the world of cinema, becoming an elliptical meditation on the experiences of indigenous communities across the Americas.  A film that resists easy categorization, dreamily moving in and out of time periods, with no illuminating explanations within the film, the connecting link is people who have been marginalized by society, who have sought isolation, not that they had a choice, but it offers a protection against the toxic influences of the more heavily populated regions who maintain authoritative and political control, still posing a problem to them.  Death is a pervasive theme, as it invades these isolated spaces, often coming out of nowhere, like a mysterious force, as there aren’t nearby hospitals or medical centers, so people are largely on their own, where the life expectancy is considerably lower for residents of the Pine Ridge reservation (by twenty years!), the lowest anywhere in the United States, while also plagued by an 80 to 90% unemployment rate, with more than 80% of residents suffering from alcoholism (described as liquid genocide), where the persistent problems are rooted in America’s colonial history (Life on the Pine Ridge Native American reservation), standing defiantly against the corrosive forces of history, yet subject to the laws of nature.  The film is essentially an exploratory journey through time, like an undiscovered frontier, where some obviously get lost along the way, like buried secrets, losing contact with their own identity, where the natural scenery couldn’t be more intoxicating, as we follow a group mining for gold in the rivers, also a ceremony of recounting dreams out in the jungle, yet a common element is a pervasive loneliness that leaves them feeling strangely distant and alienated from themselves and their culture.  Thought-provoking and mesmerizingly beautiful, an enigmatic work that simply doesn’t look like other films, penetrating into mythical spaces, co-written by Alonso with Martín Caamaño and Fabián Casas, delving into themes of loss and the quest for personal redemption, painting a picture of the harsh realities facing indigenous communities, who routinely deal with poverty and neglect.  Despite their profound connection to the land, indigenous peoples are always moving, transcending the bounds of their physical state, where their ancestral beliefs and mysticism have been crushed by Manifest Destiny and its devastating aftereffects, erasing their connection to the land while shattering their cultural equilibrium.