REVIEW: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

How does one define the faux-auteur? A filmmaker who can paint his shit brown and pass it off as a worthy two hours of celluloid (John Waters)? A porn-lover who can cast teeny boppers so desperate to enhance their credibility they'll get naked and pretend to have underaged sex for two hours (Larry Clark)?

Let me count the ways.

Take David Cronenberg, whose filmic oeuvre repeatedly showcases his virtuosic ability to mix corn syrup and food coloring into myriad vomitous forms. The Fly. Existenz (which I really liked). Naked Lunch. His latest is A History of Violence, starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello and Ed Harris.

The film goes awry from the opening minutes with two schlocky porn-stache-wearing bad guys walking out of a motel to pack up their car to the sound of chirping crickets. The atmosphere is supposed to forebode. Instead we're asking when the actual movie starts. It is these bad guys who have the misfortune of holding up Viggo Mortensen's small-town diner and discovering that Viggo is awfully good at killing bad guys. Maybe too good.

The film is a half-beat off in every scene, down to the extra time spent on displaying the exploded brain of Viggo Mortensen's shooting victim (classic Cronenberg gross-out when none is necessary). Ed Harris's glass-eyed baddie is dispatched surprisingly only halfway through the film, leaving the rest of the runtime to flounder in a back-and-forth between two B-movie subplots: a) my husband's a killer, how can things ever be the same and b) since I'm a former killer who just killed again, I can't pretend to be a good guy anymore but maybe if I kill my former bad guy boss, I can go back to slinging coffee at the local diner.

Needless to say, neither work, though I must give an A for effort when William Hurt shows up as Viggo's bad-guy-boss brother and hams it up enough for eight Farrelly Brothers films. Why hasn't he done more comedies?