.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

Bacon, lettuce and tomato. Larry, Moe and Curly. Sex, Violence and Cronenberg. Some things are just meant to go together.

Now I can forgive the casual filmgoer if the name David Cronenberg is not easily recognizable. Born in Toronto, Canada, Cronenberg has put together a resume that makes the most avid of Fangoria magazine stutter with respect but his choice of genre doesn't exactly make himself a name thrown around at the dinner table. With a career that started in the 1960's mostly with television, Cronenberg made his first impression with audiences in 1975 with the horror film Shivers. The film was hardly a masterpiece, but it set Cronenberg's career in flight and he was able to get $500 million for financing for his next feature, Rabid that starred both sexual mega-star Marilyn Chambers and a bunch of blood sucking zombies (there is no real connection between the two, it's just fun to put Chambers and zombies in the same sentence).

The years that followed produced forgettable but watchable horror fare with Scanners, The Brood and Videodrome to name a few, but then in 1983, Cronenberg had the opportunity to direct a Stephen King novel (which in 1983 was not as yawned at proposition as it is in the new millennium). The result was The Dead Zone starring Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen and alas, Cronenberg had finally arrived.

His follow-ups including The Fly, Dead Ringers and The Naked Lunch were well received and earned him a fan base of anyone who ever understood and appreciated a Hunter S. Thompson novel.

Up and down the filmography there is a consistent theme, sex and violence. You have to look no further than Cronenberg's Crash and eXistenZ to see how comfortable the director is at making the audience uncomfortable with his mix of blood and skin.

So it should come to no surprise then that Cronenberg was attracted to the graphic novel A History of Violence by John Wagner and Vince Locke. After all the screenplay as adapted by Josh Olson told the story of an ordinary man in a small unknown town that after defending the patrons of the local diner from two murdering thugs, is thrust into the spotlight where his violent past comes back to haunt him.

This ordinary man is Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) and after his heroic event appears on television throughout the country, a big time mobster named Carl Fogarty recognizes him and travels to the small town to both confront and take back to Philadelphia the same man that he remembers as Joey Cusack.

The appearance of Fogarty and his car full of goons sends the Stall family into a tailspin. At first denying a previous life of crime, Tom soon reveals to his wife (played so incredibly well by Coyote Ugly's Maria Bello), that his past has indeed caught up to him and that the Joey they refer to was exorcised in the desert years ago. But with hardly enough time to adjust to the sickening news that the man whose last name she has accepted was once one of the same people terrorizing the Stall family, the two most find a common ground to at least fight the violence that stalks them.

Cronenberg does a fantastic job of telling the story of the Stall family without getting off tracked by subplots, over wrought musical scores or a Hollywood story arc that would have made this film appealing to the Bruce Willis action heroes. Instead, we get a tight, violent when required story that ends up being one of the best films of the year simply because it quietly goes about its business.

And that is harder to accomplish than you might think. When Carl reveals to Tom's wife that Joey was responsible to taking barbed wire to his face thus blinding him in one eye, lesser directors would have had a flashback to an empty warehouse so that the violence of that particular atrocity could be played out in bloody detail. And when Joey/Tom does travel back to Philly to confront his older brother Richie, the scene stealing performance by William Hurt might have lead to a few additional shots included that would be unnecessary to the overall climax.

Don't get me wrong, A History of Violence does have its blood splattering, gut wrenching gore. People are shot through the head, bones are broken and the body count does get into the double digits. But it all seems to necessary to show how violence is all around us and that it is hard to escape no matter what new leaf you try to turn.

Premiering at Cannes and again at the Toronto Film Festival, A History of Violence was very well received by both the foreign and domestic critics. Audiences seemed to appreciate the straight forwardness of the plot and weren't turned off by the sex - and there is enough to earn the movie an R-rating - that is mixed right in amongst the gun shooting. But I do caution those that only go to the theatre once every few months for a night out. A History of Violence might be too much of some things and too little of others for you to fully appreciate the experience without the luxury of pausing the film and digesting the on-screen developments.

But whether it is on DVD early next year or with a group of strangers at the local theatre, A History of Violence is one of the best films of the year and should not be missed.