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?  

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

 

Director RaMell Ross

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING                  B                                          USA  (76 mi)  2018  d: RaMell Ross          

If we weren’t stuck in our first-person points of view, I would argue that most problems in the world that have to do with inequality would be solved, because we wouldn’t be stuck in our single points of views.                                                                                                                   —Director RaMell Ross                

Much has been written about this boldly impressionistic, kaleidoscopic film, which is largely a photographic exercise, basically confronting viewers to question what they see, documenting small-town life in rural Alabama, where the intent appears to be to break the mold and defy age-old stereotypical perceptions of black life by creating something new, where the filmmaker literally establishes his own uncompromising vision, which is more challenging for viewers.  Told in a non-linear fashion, for the most part, unbound by preconceived ideas on filmmaking, where a stereotypical myth of blackness is entangled at the root of the American South’s depiction, a mythology upheld in textbooks, institutions, media, film, and literature, evolving into fact and growing into laws, so the director treads new ground using a process that evolved organically through his personal engagement with the people and spaces of Hale County, Alabama, honoring its participants by resisting easy consumption, instead challenging our intellect with what has been described as a new aesthetic, offering a fresh and unpretentious take on an often overlooked part of American life, tucked out of sight, away from the distractions of media attention, where life and death exists here much as it did decades ago, with families and neighbors in close contact with one another, where there are literally no secrets, Independent Lens | Hale County This Morning, This Evening ... YouTube (2:09).  With no voice-overs or talking-head interviews, with an unobtrusive electronic musical score by Alex Somers and Scott Alario, the filmmaker utilizes landscape photography to allow nature to occasionally intrude.  What’s not shown and never mentioned is the long history of racial oppression, as this is a place where Martin Luther King sought refuge in a safe house from the Ku Klux Klan just two weeks before his assassination, now a Black History Museum in Greensboro, Safe House Black History Museum: Home, featuring endless acres of cotton fields, where poor white sharecropping families were once the subject of Walker Evans photographs in the 1941 book LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, with a text by James Agee, capturing the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression, a book that inspired Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera The Tender Land.  But that was then and this is now, with the region currently populated largely by people of color, where dreams of a better life have more available options, but people are still economically stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty, where the county’s median income is around $30,000, so progress is slow in coming, if at all, with many facing the same roadblocks preventing advancement, creating a cyclical Sisyphean feel, like a heavy weight of history being held over their heads.  Graduating with degrees in English and Sociology from Georgetown University, while also playing point guard on the basketball team until he was sidelined by injuries, earning a Master’s in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, currently working as an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department, Ross is a unique visual artist, awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, a Rhode Island Foundation MacColl Johnson artist Fellowship, Howard Foundation Fellowship, USA Artist Fellowship, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow, and was a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University, with this film winning the 2018 Sundance U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, where his work has also been featured in various art museums.  While this film was nominated for an Academy Award in Documentary Film in 2018, the award was given to Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s FREE SOLO (2018), featuring the extraordinary, death-defying rock climbing skills without ropes or other protective equipment by Alex Honnold.   

Stylistically, Ross has developed his own signature experimental style that is not like other black filmmakers, as it doesn’t have the humanist, cinéma vérité aesthetic of Charles Burnett out of the UCLA L.A. Rebellion school of the 60’s and 70’s, perhaps best exemplified by Killer of Sheep (1979), which this film resembles, especially in its depiction of children, or Spike Lee’s tone of provocation in exploring the complexities of black cultural identity in America, like Do the Right Thing (1989), or the sensualized, poetic flair of Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Top Ten List #1 Moonlight, whose films owe a debt of influence to Asian filmmaker Wong Kar-wai.  More than the others, this has the abstract, experimental style of Jean-Luc Godard, as it emphasizes an analytic, intellectual aspect of filmmaking that can feel obtuse and unapproachable, as the style itself is distancing, leaving viewers to reflect as much on the visual aesthetic as the subject matter, where the film is a counterpoint to the politicization of people of color and the entertainment industry’s idealizations of black life.  Ross shows blackness in a way that has rarely been depicted onscreen, with an unsentimentalized focus on emotions and perceptions as opposed to narrative actions, experimenting with form, literally creating a new cinematic language, with creative consultation from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with his blend of naturalism and poetic realism, maker of SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (2006), UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010), the somnambulistic Cemetery of Splendor (Rak ti Khon Kaen) (2015), or more recently 2022 Top Ten List #3 Memoria (2021).  The director spent five years shooting, moving to Greensboro, Alabama in 2009 to teach photography and coach high school basketball, where he didn’t initially think of shooting a film, but was simply photographing things of interest before deciding to shoot on a DSLR video camera, accumulating an astonishing 1300 hours of footage, pared down to just 76-minutes by Ross and three others in the editing room, making this a deliberately impressionistic and exploratory film, reminiscent of the quasi-experimental work of Terrence Malick’s later films, 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012),  Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017).  What’s perhaps surprising about this documentary is that it appears to be guided by mundane moments, following multiple protagonists over the course of several years, where sometimes they speak directly into the camera, and sometimes they are simply being observed, using a fly on the wall approach, capturing life as it is being lived, offering no sociological or philosophical conclusions, with little that might seem special or out of the ordinary, which viewers may find challenging in holding our attention, as it’s difficult to sell the banal, yet these are simply moments that most blacks will recognize as having lived through, and there is something deeply meaningful in the personalized way that it is shown.  Entertaining it is not, however, and viewers may find themselves easily distracted and confused by the Godardian dialectic, which is simply not for everyone, as many of the characters are difficult to understand, where it seemingly jumps around at random, with no coherent message, immersing viewers into the connected lives of various black individuals and families in the community, perhaps insisting that we view them on their own terms without filters or bias.  Curiously, in the only artificial, non-natural inclusion, the film also includes archival clips from the 1913 silent film, LIME KILN CLUB FIELD DAY, the first feature to star a black actor, in this case black entertainer Bert Williams in blackface, a popular silent era comedian who played the vaudeville circuit, like a ghost of cinema’s past, using intentionally off-putting moments that remind us of the origins of black representation in cinema, probing how blackness has come to be seen by large viewing audiences, introducing historical questions of ethical concerns. 

Hale County is named in honor of Confederate officer Stephen Fowler Hale, established at the end of the Civil War, with whites controlling much of the economic and political power in the county, enforced early by violence and later by decades of disenfranchisement of black voters through a statewide imposition of Jim Crow laws that were not overturned until after 1965, leaving behind a legacy of segregation and economic stagnation, with more than 25% of the population today living below the poverty line, where most everyone seems to end up working in the refrigerated conditions of a catfish processing plant.  Poetically addressing the region’s shift in demographics and the power that lies within the community in purely human terms, Ross, whose presence is occasionally seen or heard, focuses his attention on two young high school students he met while working as a teacher and basketball coach, Quincy Bryant, a struggling young father, along with his wife Latrenda “Boosie” Ash, who is pregnant with twins, and their energetic young child Kyrie, and Daniel Collins, raised by his grandmother until he was 12, as his mother’s boyfriend had “an attitude problem,” who dreams of playing in the NBA, with only one of them making it to college, able to seek out new opportunities at Selma University, a historically black college, while the other finds himself saddled by the responsibilities of a growing family, with each flowing in and out of the frame.  Using onscreen intertitles, like chapter headings, they pose poetic and philosophically thoughtful questions that aren’t immediately answerable, but offer a literary provocation of setting a mood, like “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”  “How do we not frame someone?”  “Where does time reside?” Ross captures ordinary scenes in a series of tableaux shots, exposing brief vignettes in time, like a slow-motion drive down a heavily populated main street awaiting a parade, the camera fixed straight ahead, or a student’s perspective of a classroom discussion, the unbridled enthusiasm of a child gleefully running back and forth between the living room and hallway, the hypnotic singing and bodies swaying at church, basketball and cheerleading practice, storm clouds and rain, kids playing in the streets, a nose piercing, a birthing scene, the joy of shooting off fireworks, a smoke-filled burning of tires, watching the sunlight filtering through the trees, a bee turning in circles in the back of a truck, and even a fast food drive-through, where voices are heard in the background, but rarely seen, keeping viewers off-balance, accentuated by odd camera angles that are equally unexpected.  While a shocking tragedy occurs, it is viewed as part of the everyday moments of the human experience, receiving no extra attention, with Ross respectfully observing in an understated and minimally invasive manner.  A collection of jagged, fleeting moments, the black experience has rarely, if ever, been shown this way, as it never shows important decisions being made, with only a few impactful moments, so it doesn’t allow viewers to cast judgment on what they see, but it does allow them to feel the fragility of the interpersonal relationships, where one glaring observation is just how much this film emphasizes youth, making them an essential component of the community, as they represent the future.  These young protagonists are not yet adults, yet they’re already playing adult roles, growing up too soon, where Daniel’s mother Mary can actually be heard telling her son that he is spending too much time with her, that she’s tired from all her many obligations, and needs her own space.  This is simply not what we’re typically used to hearing, or seeing, but it offers a powerful reflection on what a hard life it is being black, as it wears you out, physically and emotionally, as you’re challenged and tested on a daily basis for your entire lifespan.  It may come as a bit of a shock, with no real success stories to speak of, instead there are shared moments that collectively have a value, where the impact is internalized, with this filmmaker envisioning a new way of seeing a connection to an identifiable black consciousness, providing some of the most intimate glimpses, with viewers slowly coming to the realization why they matter, with the music of Billie Holiday providing the final grace note over the end credits, Billie Holiday: Stars Fell On Alabama (1957) YouTube (3:50).