Thoughts on A History of Violence

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is living the American dream. He's the owner of Millbrook, Indiana's local diner where all his regulars know his name. Wife Edie (Maria Bello), is the local lawyer. They have two children (teenage Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young Sarah (Heidi Hayes)) but neither child-rearing nor twenty years of marriage has diminished the couple's ardor. It's a perfect life.

The peace is broken one evening by two hardened men who enter the diner at closing time. Tom is acquiescent at first, willing to be robbed to avoid confrontation, but when the threat of imminent death looms over his employees and customers, the meek diner proprietor leaps into action and in moments, the interlopers are dead.

Celebrity finds the reluctant hero, who is cheered by the town, pressed by reporters and whose business becomes mobbed with customers. Tom doesn't want to talk about what's happened or give interviews, but before the dust can settle and life can get back to normal, a black shadow out of the past alights in Stall's Diner.


Scarred and quietly menacing Carl Fogerty (Ed Harris) arrives flanked by a pair of henchmen and bearing unwelcome memories. Long ago, there was Joey Cusask of Philadelphia, a brutal underworld enforcer who tired of being the man he was and tried to become another who was entirely different. The result was Tom Stall, a mild and humble man who fell in love, married, sired two children and kept his secret for twenty years, never expecting to "see" Joey again.

There's a Chinese story about a master swordsman. On the eve of his wedding, he cuts off his own good arm. It's not an act of madness, but one made out of the hope that in ridding himself of the instrument of his skill, he can free himself of its burdens and live a quiet, simple life with his bride. It is not to be. Even deprived of his strong arm, the swordsman cannot ignore the forces in motion around him and forget the man that he was, and still is. Ultimately, he has to pick up the sword again and train his remaining arm so that it might be the new instrument to face his responsibilities.

I doubt that the writers of A History of Violence knew of this story, but I was struck by the spiritual parallels. In a metaphorical sense, Joey tried to cut off the violent, ruthless part of himself so he could live a peaceful life. Like the swordsman before though, he was wrong. Joey is still alive in Tom, and when the ruthless enforcer's skill is called upon to save the meek diner owner, it isn't merely a reversal of a fateful decision. The act of surviving and saving lives that Tom Stall could not have reasonably saved is the blow that fractures the illusion of the quiet family man and plunges the family into an identity crisis as Edie realizes her husband is not the man she thought he was and Jack discovers he is his father's son in ways he would never before have imagined topical. Before Tom can face his crumbling family, he must put the last of Joey's unfinished business to rest.

The end of the story is ambivalent, as the film refuses to make an easy reconciliation where all is forgiven and forgotten but at the same time eschews blind proselytization against all violence. While distasteful and spiritually destructive, violence is a part of reality and there are times when it is necessary. A history of violence needn't begat a future of the same kind, but to purge the past from memory is not the answer. Joey Cusack can change, did change, but he can't simply be supplemented by Tom Stall in the same body. For better or worse, the two faces must accept the past and make a future together as a whole man. The only one that had in reality existed.

But there's hope.