A History of Violence (2005)

“In this family we do not solve our problems by hitting people.

David Cronenberg is known for a certain type of film. This is very different from that type. Yet it's a very different type of film- an action film that's based around nuanced character and acting, and rather intelligent and thoughtful among all the violence, anyone?

It's hard, indeed impossible to discuss this film without spoilers. But it's about more than the twist; it's about how we can all construct our identities, about interiority, about the hope of redemption, about the violence that lurks within us, about what may lie beneath respectable and upstanding lives, about the alien nature of other people and the impossibility of truly knowing them, even if you're married to them, in love and still have good (and fetishistic) sex. But then, of course, in a very deep sense Edie does know who Tom is now. The past is a foreign country.

There's enough graphic violence here to qualify this as an action film, yet it's clever enough to simultaneously appeal to the arty film crowd. Viggo Mortensen gives a towering and dualistic performance that is truly extraordinary, although credit is also very much due to Maria Bello and to William Hurt, who shows his extraordinary versatility in a part very different from usual.

This is an extraordinary film, and one of the finest I've seen for a good many months.

Secret Window (2004)

"I did those things so you didn't have to."

It's increasingly unusual to see Johnny Depp in a film where he's neither playing Captain Jack Sparrow nor being directed by Tim Burton. Here he is, though, on one of those Stephen King-penned thrillers that are, by sheer coincidence, making up an increasingly large proportion of the films I'm blogging.

It's a typical Stephen King thriller, right down to having a writer native to Maine as the hero, and it makes an excellent film with a superb twist. The interplay between Depp's dishevelled Morton Rainey and John Turturro's menacing hick, John Shooter, is disturbingly effective, as it has to be for the film to work.

I won't say anything about the twist, except to praise it in vague yet fulsome terms. But every storytelling beat is perfectly placed for this thriller to have maximum effect, as we should expect for a film based on King's work. There are nice touches; Depp's performance in general, of course, and the use of cigarettes (he's supposed to be giving up) to denote Morton's mood.

The twist is especially neat, especially as life increasingly mirrors the short story under dispute. This is a well executed, deeply satisfying and underappreciated film.