The past that catches up with A History of Violence's Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen)--even his name evokes a temporary abeyance--involves violence, flight, and denial before the eventual, inevitable embrace of the Jungian shadow, collective or personal. It opens languidly with a conversation between two drifters that ends with a shock-reveal, proceeding into the introduction of a pastoral small-town setting where Stall is a beloved, diner-owning member of a Rockwellian Midwest community. The drifters intrude like monsters from the Id (they're driven, it seems, by the same base concerns as Cronenberg's sexual parasites), and Stall fights them off with the kind of heroism that leads to national news crews camping out on his front lawn. The attention attracts the notice of one-eyed mobster Carl Fogaty (Ed Harris, in his best performance in years), henchman for mid-level kingpin Richie Cusack (William Hurt, ditto), asking the key question of Tom's wife, Edie (Maria Bello): how she supposes mild-mannered Tom knows how to kill so well.

It's not just the skill, of course, it's the relish, and the way Cronenberg and Mortensen approach Tom's gradual reawakening to the call of his lizard brain is, in its way, as sly a character deconstruction as Dennis Cleg's in Spider, or that of Dead Ringers' Mantle brothers. More so than usual, Cronenberg's character implosion becomes a meta-commentary on the audience for the kind of questionable entertainments this film represents--Stall is the director's first genuine "everyman": no outsider, not unbalanced by ambition or the urge to evolve into a biomechanical form, he is the insect that dreamed he was a man from his The Fly--and for maybe the first time, we cheer his inhumanity rather than mourn the loss of his humanity. Confounding (astounding) in its ambition, A History of Violence has even larger aspirations, tackling the lie of the myth of the bucolic, prelapsarian small-town with the twisted, literary dread of Ray Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven". Each member of Stall's family is singled out for bemused scrutiny (most jarring about A History of Violence is Cronenberg's trademark scalpel intellectualism applied to the "innocents"), purified in the crucible of our lowest animal motivations. Edie's sexual fantasies, son Jack's (Ashton Holmes) nascent rage, young daughter Sarah's (Heidi Hayes) budding complicity in dad's reintegration into society post-metamorphosis: each is manipulated metaphysically in turn, each is challenged by Cronenberg's precise, machinelike inquiries to reveal the beast hiding in the skin.

Cronenberg is somehow getting better as he goes along. He's funnier and more cocksure than he's ever been in A History of Violence, a superb comedy of manners and as devastating an indictment of the thin veneer of civilization as Lars Von Trier's Dogville. Tellingly, it's almost as challenging a text: its artificiality in design and logic is an instant mnemonic throwback to a certain kind of B studio production (wry in that this is Cronenberg's alleged "sell out" to big studio backing and A-list stars), understanding that just the fact of that "period" feel fuels the idea of the past imposing itself on the present. And its last scene, the last shot of Tom's face twisted by some ambiguous emotion, is haunted in its understatement and the vastness of its implications; the true aftershocks of A History of Violence aren't that things will never be the same, but the infinitely more troubling possibility that things may never have been--and, indeed, can never be--any different.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

1.82:1 DVD capture: A History of Violence

New Line's Platinum Series DVD of A History of Violence is quite a spread. Start with an exceptional 1.82:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer whose only caveat is in regards to overall luminance--this is one movie for which you'll need to dim the lights. In that sense, it betrays a striking fidelity to the theatrical presentation, and for what it's worth shadow detail is rarely less than excellent. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is likewise as I remembered: purposefully restrained, with each swift detonation of violence acting like jumper cables for a dormant LFE channel. Dialogue sounds crystal clear. Meanwhile, David Cronenberg contributes another in a long line of feature-length commentaries, this one marred a bit by more dead air than usual and intermittently patronizing explication of the onscreen action. Perhaps this is proof of what detractors saw as Cronenberg's underlying contempt for the material and, by extension, the audience that normally flocks to revenge movies, but there's something innocently, nay, graciously paternalistic about his desire to include every member of what will probably be his biggest DVD audience yet. His swelling with pride over the picture's claim to fame (the first depiction of a 69 in a studio release) is utterly genuine, though, as are the respects he pays the late composer Michael Kamen at the beginning of the track.

Directed by Cronenberg épouse Carolyn Zeifman--hence her unprecedented access to the set (this is the first time I can ever recall seeing B-roll captured during the filming of a sex scene)--and edited by Julie Ng (who oversaw that great documentary on Willard), the 66-minute, 8-part fly-on-the-wall documentary "Acts of Violence" is where it's at. It's a treat to watch Cronenberg direct--he's flexible but confident and knows to flatter actors into thinking they're having brilliant epiphanies when they're really coming around to his hidden agenda--and to watch him micromanage the makeup effects, though I wish the scope of this making-of had been expanded to encompass pre- and post-production. I also wonder if a tad more editorializing was in order (David Prior's often-wry text annotations are missed), as there's insufficient context for actor Greg Bryk's crackpot remarks that he wants to know what it would feel like to hold a little girl at gunpoint. Next find "Scene 44" (3 mins.), complete with optional commentary from Cronenberg; like The Fly Special Edition's "monkey-cat" scene, this omitted nightmare sequence was finished specifically for the DVD, as Cronenberg jettisoned it early on in the editing process for being tonally inconsistent with the rest of the film. (As such, it's presented in anamorphic widescreen and 5.1 Dolby Digital.) An appendix of sorts to "Acts of Violence", "The Unmaking of Scene 44" (7 mins.) goes behind-the-scenes of the titular elision. Here, Ed Harris, who has already confessed that the chance to work with Cronenberg was the only thing that appealed to him about A History of Violence, genially laughs off the hours he spent inside a prosthetic chest cavity. "I don't get off on that stuff like David does," he says, "but I enjoy his enjoyment of it." It's a lovely moment.

In "Violence's History: U.S. Version Vs. International Version" (1 mins.), Cronenberg explains that since the two cuts differ by a mere couple of shots (compared side-by-side in splitscreen), New Line could hardly justify the expense of putting both of them on the DVD. Surprisingly, I think, the MPAA let every frame of T&A slide--their main problem was with the volume of blood that gushes out of fallen henchmen. Lastly, "Too Commercial for Cannes" (9 mins.) opens with Cronenberg asserting that he hopes the film is too mainstream for La Croisette; it wasn't, which all but confirms that the auteur is a little out of touch with what constitutes commercial cinema these days. We then shadow Cronenberg at Cannes as he juggles responsibilities to A History of Violence (press junkets, red-carpet appearances) and the French edition of PREMIERE MAGAZINE, for whom he's covering the festival as a guest journalist. Alas, Viggo Mortensen's Sam Houston getup steals a lot of his thunder, at least from where we're sitting. Teaser and full trailers for A History of Violence, startup trailers for Take the Lead, 11:14, Havoc, and Domino, and ROM-based weblinks round out the platter.-Bill Chambers

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THE DEAD ZONE

THE FLY

eXistenZ

SPIDER

EASTERN PROMISES

FROM FLIES TO SPIDERS

DAVID CRONENBERG RE-EXAMINES DAVID CRONENBERG