A History of Violence (2005): a draft essay

Cronenberg ventures into a Lynchian realm of the uncanny in A History of Violence, a stylish pseudo-thriller in disguise. What begins as a genre film that engages the voyeur turns against the audience and results in an intellectual complicity; when the good guys justifiably obliterate the bad men, the discerning viewer wonders if the defeated were merely replaced by something deadlier. In this dark film, trouble gravitates towards a peaceful family man & his small community when mobsters seek his attention after a publicized heroic act. Beneath the suspense & exhilaration of self-defense lurks the inelegant outcome of self-preservation. The "aw shucks" small town setting evokes Blue Velvet’s Lumberton; the evil man sports a grotesque facial disfigurement instead of a breathing mask that feeds a sewer of obscenity. However, after the thrill of the main action, the film does not conclude with the verdant landscape of sunshine on white picket fences, but a protagonist who returns an outsider from what Stephen Price would call “the wilderness” (Prince 260).

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List of... Easy-viewing Movies

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Better known as "IKWIG."Romantic fable set in the Hebrides of Scotland. The Archers' Romantic comedy is charming & filled with memorably lines, such as "There ought to be a law about trees!"

Walkabout (1971)
Nic Roeg's enigmatic film transforms a severe turn of events into a trance-like rite of passage in the Australian desert. A non-Western where civilization & the wilderness seem to co-exist in a time capsule that is a thing of beauty to behold. If viewers can tolerate the abstract juxtaposition of images, the "transportive" music & visuals will sweep them into a temporal paradise with a strange momentum of its own.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Whenever a recent funny movie features a leopard or similarly untamed felines, this Howard Hawks screw-ball comedy comes to mind. Susan & David seem to be metaphors for the prototypical male & female in courtship mode, especially when one party is both consciously & subconsciously non-consenting. A screwy comedy that is just about as delightful as Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940).

The Searchers (1956)
The Classical Western. I wonder if the definition of "the western genre film" was greatly influenced by this well-studied, seminal film of the classical western style. Ethan's racism (protagonist) is sometimes argued as the film's fatal flaw, but these cententions are often taken out of context. There are plenty of other film characters that are walking contradictions, namely the self-destroying Jewish-Nazi Danny Balint (Henry Bean's The Believer); Ethan remains the outsider at the conclusion & with John Ford's classical frame/composition, we infer that our gunslinger remains condemned to the wilderness of Monument Valley.

Manhattan (1979)
This movie has been called Woody Allen's love poem to his "hometown" New York City. I share this thought.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Despite the fact that Dreyer's systematic use of the close-up dominates this one-tone film, the experience of seeing intense emotional suffering during the protagonist's act of martyrdom transcends schadenfreude. (Word of Caution: this is the least easy-viewing of the bunch)

Blue Velvet (1986)
I "Blue Velvet" for a good laugh at the cinema; to experience the state between waking dream & reckless laughter. Best experienced with a crowd, say in a college film class.

The Shop Around The Corner (1940)
Lubitsch is probably the master of the sex comedy in the mythical era sometimes called "The Golden Age of Hollywood." Remade as a Judy Garland/Van Johnson musical & Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks romantic comedy. A comfort film for those snow days.

Layer Cake (2004)

Matthew Vaughn & J.J. Connolly's Layer Cake is undoubtedly a British gangster film. However, it is not by default a good film. Hodges’s Get Carter (1971) starring Michael Caine is a close comparison in terms of genre, its final shot & a preoccupation with close-ups of it’s leading man pondering ambiguously at the camera. I must admit that no English-made gangster film has been able to rival their American forebears in Hollywood films starring James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Al Pacino. London-born Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000) does operate in this crime genre, but it’s salient cinematic quality rests in Ray Winstone’s likeable, sympathetic character and it’s generally character-driven story; it is also a much simpler plot with the “good” guys drawn contrastingly against the bad men. Layer Cake fails as a cohesive film because there’s an inconsistency between the tone of its exposition and the rest of the story. The narrative flows with an uneven rhythm, unintentionally.

For the moment, I am inclined to think that the British gangster film is certainly not to my taste & I wonder how much this owes to their heritage in this industry-driven art. I cannot help but think of Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts & Coronets (1949) when I contemplated the anti-climatic ending to Layer Cake. The former is a heavily-narrated black comedy whose final twist is wickedly funny & quintessentially English in it’s dead pan tenor. However, the impassive tone in the final moments of Layer Cake is nothing more than an inglorious conclusion. As a reading & film viewing public sensitive to moral social messages ranging from billboards to toilet-stall readers, the protagonist’s sudden, traumatic downturn is jarring but redundant. If you must fetishize over images of Daniel Craig again after
Casino Royale (2006), be informed.

L'enfant (2005)

There is an anti-analytical, perhaps anti-intellectual, quality to Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne's cinematic slice of urban vagrancy in L'enfant. In avoidance of attaching the terms "realism" or "realistic" to this French film, which exhibits influences from early Godard & Truffaut, one could contend that it is devoid of any self-reflexivity or sociological agenda. So, what is the point of showing moviegoers glimpses of a day-in-the-life-of a vagabond who ponders the illegal sale of his newborn baby if not to make social commentary? Perhaps, the Dardennes are looking to update Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” with an ever more mobile & close-quarter camera eye, particularly via handheld close-up shots that pan & linger.

The unspoken spiritual kinship between Bruno, the lead character, & Sonia, the mother of his child, depicted through their child-like frolickings and hermetic “two-shot” moments remain memorable scenes seldom witnessed in cinema. For a film driven not by its plot, but by sustained & adjoining tension from scene to scene, it draws the discerning & willing viewer into the street life of an under-achieving petty thief. Those viewers who require more structure & plot points are forewarned. However, for those who enjoy vetting the cinematic frontiers of reconstructed & scrutinized reality, view on.

The Proposition (2005)

It does not do this Australian film justice to praise it as a “must-see film,” or with some other superlative marketing remark; such comments are bound to skew audience expectation. Nonetheless, “The Proposition” is an unusual approach to the western genre as the lead characters are indeed outsiders who never fit in to a community and end up awash, riding into an open-ended terrain. Though I would consider Guy Pearce’s character the protagonist in the plot about liberating an innocent brother and Ray Winstone’s policeman as a major character, perhaps a counterpoint, the film stays at a Brechtian distance. This is not a character-driven western in a conventional sense; the characters' psychology is of little significance and the action remains always external. This also means that the entire film transcends the individual characters in favor of a metaphor for a place, a sweltering & viscerally brutal “fresh hell.” The real lead character here is a continent; the untamed impression of Australia.