David Cronenberg is one of the few directors who’s worthy of his own adjective. "Cronenbergian" conjures images of bizarre techno-organic creations, like the VCR vagina in Videodrome or the weird living typewriter bug of Naked Lunch. His early films were almost all horror, exploring the intersection of the human body and technology. More recently, he’s embarked on a new phase of his career, making films that are less genre and more mainstream. A History of Violence is his most successful of these films, thanks to a really compelling narrative, and a feeling of underlying rotting sickness that digs into the corruption beneath what looks like a small town ideal.
The film centers on Viggo Mortensen’s Tom, a seemingly ordinary family man in a small town. After dramatically stopping a robbery at a diner, his life begins to unravel, and secrets of his past come to the surface. The film’s deconstruction of suburbia echoes Lynch’s Blue Velvet, simultaneously tearing apart the illusion of safety that is suburban life, and celebrating it. But, unlike Lynch’s protagonists, Tom is aware of the fallacy of suburbia from the beginning. He’s trying to live with the innocence that his wife and family have, but is inevitably doomed to fail thanks to the darkness that lurks within him.
Looking at the film from an auteur perspective, the film features just enough Cronenberg elements to remain distinctly his — there is some graphic, weird violence, and the questions of identity are omnipresent in his oeuvre. However, at the same time, it’s a much more accessible package. The film is very violent, but it’s not as instantly off-putting as the bizarre worlds of Crash or Videodrome. As such, the film fluctuates at times between feeling like a somewhat generic thriller, and channeling that distinctly Cronenberg weirdness. Some people might say that he’s selling out by making films that abandon the idiosyncracies of his early work, but I think it’s a sign of artistic evolution. This film is much more compelling than Existenz, which was Cronenberg on autopilot, indulging all his pet concepts without any underlying emotional connection.
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