WITH A History of Violence, Toronto director David Cronenberg has made the best film of his career.

Now, before you dismiss the notion that a 62-year-old who has been plying his trade in the film business for 30 years – and who hasn’t rattled the film world since Crash, nine years ago – could possibly be at his most inspired now, it is worth pointing out that Howard Hawks was the same age when he made his celebrated western Rio Bravo, Alfred Hitchcock was 60 when he made Psycho, and Luis Buñuel was 71 when he made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The comparisons are apt, as Cronenberg will bring up all these names in the course of a conversation.

I found History so intense that I had a physical reaction to it. I don’t know whether it’s because I saw it at a 10 a.m. screening, bleary-eyed after putting an issue of Playback to bed, but it pretty much sapped me of energy for the rest of the day. I had a similarly intense reaction to Crash, but found this feeling far more satisfying. Maybe that’s because the new film has more of a moral center, whereas I tend to side with those who see Crash as an exercise in depravity spiraling out of control. (Of course, the filmmaker would disagree.) On the other hand, I can appreciate Crash for being bold and original in an era of ‘homogenized hokum,’ to use a term from Peter Weller, star of the director’s Naked Lunch (see p. 24.)

There will be those who prefer their Cronenberg films more outlandish than History. Many treasure the cyber-punk classic Videodrome for its pure weirdness; for others, the pinnacle is Dead Ringers, with its overriding sense of dread; and then there’s Naked Lunch, the hallucinogenic fusion of the visions of William S. Burroughs and the filmmaker. How then, these fans might ask, could these films be artistically surpassed by a thriller made for a Hollywood studio (New Line Cinema), set in a place called Millbrook, Indiana and based on a graphic novel – one, in fact, that the director admits to having little fondness for?

The plot of the film, which wowed ’em at Cannes and opens in Canada Sept. 23, sounds familiar. A seemingly decent small-town man, played by Viggo Mortensen – loving husband, caring father and owner of a local diner – becomes inadvertently involved in a violent incident with a couple of bad men who pass through town, and the incident begets more bad men, and soon our protagonist is fighting for his family’s very survival. It is a sort of western. Think, for example, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

Par for the course in Hollywood, the film had a test screening in Pasadena. Yes, it is aimed at a mainstream audience. But here Cronenberg has his cake and gets to eat it, too. Like Hawks and Hitchcock, the auteur’s presence suffuses the film and its genre trappings. Cronenberg may be looking to please the Hollywood execs and the ever-important American audience, but at the same time he continues to push the envelope – New Line was nervous about the film’s graphic nature, especially the sex – and you don’t have to look far to recognize the themes close to his heart. For example, the volatile relationship between violence and sex – so key in Crash – comes in to play, as does the director’s career-long obsession with the destruction of the human body.

Cronenberg has gotten better at his craft. The US$32 million budget helped, bringing a top-notch cast, including Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris and William Hurt, and allowing him 53 shooting days to perfect his material, whereas he had 40 on the Canada/U.K. copro Spider, made for one-quarter that amount.

You will see that in this issue, which celebrates the filmmaker’s 30 years in the biz, Playback shows Cronenberg the love. And evidently there is plenty to go around. Collaborators past and present, including Mortensen, Weller and Spider’s Ralph Fiennes, along with local industry heavyweights, chime in on the director and his work. The picture drawn is consistent throughout – that he is an unsparing artist, and, simply put, a mensch.

Cronenberg occupies a unique place in English-Canadian cinema, having made all his movies here over the course of 30 years, whether they’re indie or studio films, along the way drumming up international critical support and topping the North American box office chart, as in the case of The Fly.

It has been one of the most vital careers in our national industry, and, as A History of Violence would indicate, it is one that promises to continue to divide and enthrall for years to come.

MARK DILLON, EDITOR