How one views a movie often deals with one's approach to the film. I made a mistake with this movie. I went in, having had difficulty securing a Cronenberg movie before, waiting to get an introduction to his style. I went in expecting, based on what I've heard about Cronenberg, a stylized film. I came in expecting a theme.
I was mostly disappointed on all three marks. What I ended up with was a fairly straight-forward identity thriller, and that surprised me.
Viggo Mortensen plays Tom Stall, a docile man in a docile world. Viggo Mortensen's style of acting, judging by Lord of the Rings, Hidalgo, and this film, is to whisper when he's getting dramatic. This works well with the film in that everyone in it is either just as docile as Tom, or trying to be smooth and stoic, which involves an outward appearance of docility. Tom Stall owns a café, has a good family, has no worries but that he can't get his truck started. Then some violent criminals decide to mess with his coworkers during closing, and he shows a side of himself nobody (in the film) expected: the ability to kill with relative ease. So thus the audience is in the search for his identity, who he is, and where he came from.
This film started many things and decided to give them up. At first it seems a film to look into the undercurrent of violence in even the most domestic of communities. Then it seems to be a film of mistaken identity and bad fate. Then it just decides to be another story of a man escaping a past he didn't like, and finding out that he can't... as in, what we've seen many many times before.
But it's a Cronenberg film. This means that it's stylized, interesting, and special, right? Honestly, I saw nothing in this film that struck me particularly as "something only Cronenberg could do." Sure, there's some pretty detailed gore effects, but they're sporadic, random, and worst of all, not needed for anything. Sure, there's some strange sexual encounters, but they don't really seem as anything except for sex, they don't develop the characters, they don't add anything to the story, they just exist in a sort of acceptable state of "Well, might as well find a way to show these characters having sex." They do reveal that Viggo Mortensen doesn't have that great of a body, if anybody cares about that.
Speaking of the writing, indeed, it doesn't seem real care or interest was put into the script. Nothing particularly new is given us, the dialog could have been cut and pasted in any other movie of this genre, and the character development was, again, straight-forward and unappealing.
As I mentioned before, I thought a large part of the lethargy in this film had something to do with the theme of violence as an undercurrent, but my mistake was thinking there was a theme. Even during moments when the action starts to pick up, it feels like the actors are really just sleep-walking through their roles. Only Ed Harris seemed to have any fun at all, everything else about this movie seems as though Cronenberg forced the cast and crew to stay awake for 24 hours before filming began to make everything seem lazy. Even the cinematography seems lazy after the wonderful long take at the beginning. However, stuff like the close-ups never really added to drama but more made me frustratingly want to take the director's chair and say, "All right, move back a couple of feet, give us some room!" It's not a bad film. It's just that the ending credits came up after an exhaustingly long ending sequence of no importance and I couldn't help asking, "Oh? So what?" This film is a good film to have some fun over the weekend with, but it's not really anything that can stick with you.
--PolarisDiB
I was mostly disappointed on all three marks. What I ended up with was a fairly straight-forward identity thriller, and that surprised me.
Viggo Mortensen plays Tom Stall, a docile man in a docile world. Viggo Mortensen's style of acting, judging by Lord of the Rings, Hidalgo, and this film, is to whisper when he's getting dramatic. This works well with the film in that everyone in it is either just as docile as Tom, or trying to be smooth and stoic, which involves an outward appearance of docility. Tom Stall owns a café, has a good family, has no worries but that he can't get his truck started. Then some violent criminals decide to mess with his coworkers during closing, and he shows a side of himself nobody (in the film) expected: the ability to kill with relative ease. So thus the audience is in the search for his identity, who he is, and where he came from.
This film started many things and decided to give them up. At first it seems a film to look into the undercurrent of violence in even the most domestic of communities. Then it seems to be a film of mistaken identity and bad fate. Then it just decides to be another story of a man escaping a past he didn't like, and finding out that he can't... as in, what we've seen many many times before.
But it's a Cronenberg film. This means that it's stylized, interesting, and special, right? Honestly, I saw nothing in this film that struck me particularly as "something only Cronenberg could do." Sure, there's some pretty detailed gore effects, but they're sporadic, random, and worst of all, not needed for anything. Sure, there's some strange sexual encounters, but they don't really seem as anything except for sex, they don't develop the characters, they don't add anything to the story, they just exist in a sort of acceptable state of "Well, might as well find a way to show these characters having sex." They do reveal that Viggo Mortensen doesn't have that great of a body, if anybody cares about that.
Speaking of the writing, indeed, it doesn't seem real care or interest was put into the script. Nothing particularly new is given us, the dialog could have been cut and pasted in any other movie of this genre, and the character development was, again, straight-forward and unappealing.
As I mentioned before, I thought a large part of the lethargy in this film had something to do with the theme of violence as an undercurrent, but my mistake was thinking there was a theme. Even during moments when the action starts to pick up, it feels like the actors are really just sleep-walking through their roles. Only Ed Harris seemed to have any fun at all, everything else about this movie seems as though Cronenberg forced the cast and crew to stay awake for 24 hours before filming began to make everything seem lazy. Even the cinematography seems lazy after the wonderful long take at the beginning. However, stuff like the close-ups never really added to drama but more made me frustratingly want to take the director's chair and say, "All right, move back a couple of feet, give us some room!" It's not a bad film. It's just that the ending credits came up after an exhaustingly long ending sequence of no importance and I couldn't help asking, "Oh? So what?" This film is a good film to have some fun over the weekend with, but it's not really anything that can stick with you.
--PolarisDiB