Further unpleasantness from the always unpleasant David Cronenberg. Despite the pretentious-sounding title, this is in no sense an historical record of violence as a human fundamental (dating back, say, to Cain and Abel, or farther back to the appearance of the monolith among the apes in 2001), but merely a history in the archaic sense of a story, as in H.G. Wells's The History of Mr. Polly, and also in the sense of a past: a violent story, that is, about a man with a history of violence. More exactly, the bloody chain of events unleashed when the family-man proprietor (Viggo Mortensen) of the Main Street diner in Small Town, U.S.A., is forced to fight back against two homicidal psychopaths at his lunch counter. The unpleasantness on this occasion consists, not atypically for Cronenberg, in some gratuitous gore — stomach-turning makeup effects for a bullet through the top of the head, a nose pounded up into a skull, etc. — as well as in the oppressive mood of ominousness and dread. The latter is quite admirably achieved, especially in view of the conventionality of the plot: the past catching up with a retired killer, a staple of the American action film, whether Western or contemporary crime thriller. Through such devious means as the sedate and didactic tone, the clear-eyed and controlled cinematography, the deliberate pace, and a spot of uncommonly graphic sex between happily marrieds, the film feels unconventional, feels unpredictable. And it makes good use of William Hurt's widely recognized looniness for an unexpectedly funny climax, notwithstanding the expected gore. (Beyond unexpectedly funny, it may be self-defeatingly funny.) The ultimate purpose of the thing -- the unique distinction of the thing -- comes down to precisely those sources of unpleasantness and nothing more: the gratuitous gore and the feeling of unconventionality. But the unconventionality, such as it is, proves to be just a feeling rather than a fact: it tends to evaporate rapidly at the curtain. (One recommended point of reference would be Richard Fleischer's perfectly conventional yet subtly subversive Violent Saturday, 1955, where the celebration of the small-town family man who foils the big-city bad guys, with an assist from the pitchfork of an Amish pacifist, is as ambiguous as you please.) And the gore is simply too splashy for its own good. With Maria Bello, Ed Harris. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd