Movie: A History of Violence

At first I felt a little cheated at this movie's short length and the way it does not plumb deeply into the trauma/drama of the events that unfold, but about halfway through I decided that was a near-perfect treatment - to make this a (very grim) fairy tale in its telling, stylized with just the main brushstrokes, and to leave unfinished that for which an ending would be impossible to tell. You can't make a neatly-wrapped story from a premise where all sense is lost, and the shock throughout is better left unsettled so that you feel it rather than just watch it happen.

Really I came for the violence. The first three deaths are wrongful but the rest all had it comin'. They threaten your employees, blow em away. Threaten your family, blow em away. Bully you at school, beat the shit out of em. Try to finish you off? Kill, kill, kill, kill, and...kill. (Go home, eat dinner.) For the kind of week -month, year, life- I'm having, this was very gratifying. Problem? BOOM. No more problem.

Okay, I really came for Viggo Mortensen. Upstanding family man, Indiana pure but a dagger in disguise. Sigh sigh sigh. His ability to inhabit a character is compelling. You see just a hint of the change in him when his real identity surfaces, the voice is a bit more edgy, the broad open face a little hooded, the eyes with a different past behind them. But the movie's best performance is from William Hurt, who is only onscreen for a few minutes but in that time delivers a fully developed character both funny and hideous. In the scenes between Mortensen and Ed Harris, I just kept thinking how much I want to see them playing father and son - I never thought about their physical resemblances and the nuances of expression that seem to be cut from the same cloth.

Okay, I really came for Viggo Mortensen. And all that boom, boom, boom. You won't look at a bowl of chunky tomato soup the same way again either.