The David Cronenberg movie that Viggo Mortensen called “near perfect”
Actor Viggo Mortensen played one of the most important roles in the history of 21st Century cinema when he portrayed Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The New York-born cinema icon has also drawn critical acclaim for his performances in movies such as Captain Fantastic and Green Book.
Even with all his acclaimed roles, there looks to be one movie that sticks out above the rest for Mortensen. He once claimed that the 2005 film A History of Violence, directed by David Cronenberg and also starring William Hurt and Ed Harris, is a “near perfect movie”.
Mortensen told The Hollywood Reporter: “[It’s] if not the best, it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever been in. There’s no such thing as a perfect movie, but in the way that that script was handled, the way it was shot… It’s a perfect film noir movie, or it’s close to perfect, I should say.”
The film was written by Josh Olsen as an adaptation of John Wagner and Vince Locke’s 1997 graphic novel of the same name. Mortensen plays Tom Stall, a humble diner owner who becomes a local hero when he stops an armed robbery from taking place in his small Indiana hometown.
However, when Stall is threatened by a gangster by the name of Carl Fogerty (played by Ed Harris), his world is thrown into disarray, and his formerly hidden murky past comes into illumination, shocking his family into understanding who he really is.
The film received two Academy Award nominations, a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for William Hurt and a ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ nod for Josh Olsen. Interestingly, though, Mortensen once noted that he read an early version of Olsen’s screenplay before Cronenberg had become attached to the project. Cronenberg helped Olsen to turn the “disappointing, senseless” screenplay into the excellent final product that we know today.
In light of that, it’s unsurprising to find Mortensen having kind words to say about Cronenberg. He said: “[He] has helped me do really good work, better than other directors. Maybe because he understands my process and because we have some things in common in terms of our sensibility — the kinds of books we like to read, our sense of humour is similar.”
In fact, Mortensen loved working with Cronenberg so much that he joined forces with the director two years later for the gangster film Eastern Promises. A third collaboration between the two film legends ensued in 2011 when Mortensen portrayed Sigmund Freud in Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method.
