I’m still trying to get used to seeing Viggo with short hair. This is the second movie with him since the Lord of the Rings trilogy and I still can’t bend myself not to refer to him as Aragorn, “The King”, or sometimes even Strider.
Viggo aside, there’s one more person whose “history” is worth examining – David “Deprave” Cronenberg, dubbed the King of Venereal Horror. He achieved cult status with movies like Shivers and Rabid in the 70s and the moved on to make classics like The Dead Zone, and of course, The Fly.
In Truffaut’s book-length interview with Hitchcock, the ending is very anti-climatic. Mostly because you see an old man (Hitchcock) who’s disappointed by an audience which expects him to shell out thrillers, while he, for the most part, wants to turn to new subjects.
Cronenberg breaks new (personal) ground with a movie that seems mainstream, almost formulaic. At the beginning, it seems Hitchcockian as well.
It’s about an ordinary man whose identity is in question. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) lives in a small Indiana town leading a fulfilling and happy life of a family man. He’s married to Edie (Maria Bello) and has two kids: a teenager and a young girl.
Tom owns one of the local diners, which is targeted (as chance would have it) by two psycho killers on the run. Anyone who expected a Micky and Mallory story will be disappointed. The killers’ run ends right there – both shot in a spit second by Tom.
This feat of epic proportions immediately makes the front page of the local newspapers. TV reporters are waiting patiently for an interview but they are not the only ones. This surprising publicity has also brought 3 strangers in black limo. The trio in black is lead by a scarred Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), who claims Tom is not Tom. Tom is actually Joey. Joey is a well-known gangster with a notorious history of violence.
Slowly but surely, we move towards the climax of Act 2 – another violent confrontation between Tom and the three gangsters. Against all odds, Tom is victorious again, thus confirming a part of him is still Joey.
Joey/Tom is distrusted by his own family who sees him as a gangster who lied his way to becoming a husband and a father. The final confrontation isn’t his new family, however, it’s with his old one. His gangster brother, Richie Cusack (William Hurt), calls him to arrange a meeting.
In an extraordinary scene, the two brothers meet and resolve this long overdue sibling rivalry.
The violence which turns all three acts has a sudden and bloody quality that I associate with another cult director, Takeshi Kitano. His masterpiece Fireworks draws a similar trajectory of a quiet but very violent man.
Overall, this is a movie worth seeing. I feel I owe it to Cronenberg but mostly to Hitchcock who didn’t get the chance he deserved to do something different.
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