Oracle Online

The film plays in and out of sequence, with Ralph Fiennes, the man hopelessly lost without his beloved
wife (Rachel Weisz), remembering the good before the bad, turning the deceased into a saint in his memory. In fact, Weisz is clearly not a saint, as numerous scenes without Fiennes’s presence show, but like all mourners, Fiennes puts Weisz onto a pedestal which ultimately seals his own fate.

The movie in fact knows a good deal about human frailty. The characters are basically good, yet they do things that are stupid, they make logical mistakes, they sacrifice their principles for their ultimate goal they are, in a word, human.

So many films, in an effort to make the audience empathize with the character’s feelings, make the characters more likeable than they have any right to be (I’d say see Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby but I don’t want any of you to sit through that drivel). The Constant Gardener works because its characters seem to be plucked from the street, placed onto the screen to play out a drama.

A History of Violence, on the other hand, treats its characters slightly differently, letting them come across as honorable, simple country folk until someone takes a closer look.

The film is a revelation into the world of a man who may or may not have something terrible in his past, and the ramifications that come with guilt, trust, and forgiveness. The film’s finest attribute, the thing that makes it most real, is that everything in the plot is driven by emotion. Every character acts in response to what they feel; they live straight from the heart.

Director David Cronenberg knows that his introverted players will only react when provoked, so he subtly creates unbearable tensions in their world, and observes their reactions. The actors remain introverted at first in the hopes of being pleasant, and therefore when the emotions come out, they spurt, and are thrown out in forms both violent and passionate.

Cronenberg keeps the plot grounded (as there are a few twists that could appear unbelievable in less capable hands) by making all reactions honest, and not having any character fighting for some higher cause while they’re protecting their own skin. The violence of the title therefore becomes figurative, representing the inner hurt that each player holds in, rather than the literal violence which sprays across many shots in the film.

Therefore what makes these films genuine is not that they take people from everyday life and roll the camera, but instead they poke around the psychological aspects of human reaction and mess with it.

Both movies realize that when thrown into difficult situations, people don’t always become pious heroes, but instead simply fight for a return to normalcy and for personal gratification. Saints they may not be, but real they most certainly are.