It may be the best reviewed movie of the year (which is the kind of line they use to promote a film the critics have loved but audiences have resisted) but David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence did not have Wallace and Gromit looking over their shoulder this weekend. Cameron Diaz is not sweating either. For all its entertainment value — and HOV is often enormously entertaining — the film does not set out to please. Opposite, in fact. It does not give you what you want, ultimately. But like Dylan’s debutante it may give you what you need.

Canadian Cronenberg may have grown up in a different wing of the same mental institution that housed David Lynch. Like Lynch, he has enjoyed some actual box office success (with Ringers and Dead Zone) but has also made films that even hardcore fans have had trouble with (Crash, not the race relations film of the same name but the sex-and-car-accident flick, gave a whole new twist to auto eroticism. Twisted metal, that is.) And like Lynch he is often playing above his audience’s heads. Just as many people walked out of Mulholland Drive convinced that Lynch had dropped the ball at the end, not realizing that the first 4/5 of the film was a fantasy and the last sordid bit the truth, so people have complained about Violence.

“Worst movie I’ve ever seen,” said one fellow behind me at a matinee last week and I think he was jarred by the film’s shifts in tone. Some scenes are hyper-realistic — the sound of the cereal being poured into bowls in the morning is deafening; the scrape on the back of Maria Bello after rough sex with her husband, played by Viggo Mortenson, hurts just to look at. When we want escape Cronenberg provides it: unbelievable violence, triumph of good over evil, comic book villains. But there is no release, no catharsis. The violence begets more violence and the escape is the illusion. Here Cronenberg may owe a debt to Scorsese whose best films — Taxi Driver, Raging Bull — are in part about the futility of violence, even as he lovingly recreates it.

This may not be what people want on a Saturday night. They can get that any day of the week just by picking up the paper and reading the latest from Bali, or Baghdad, or Belfast. It’s like Stephen Crane’s poem “The Heart”, in which he finds a beast eating its own heart and he asks him if it’s good.

“It is bitter — bitter,” he answered.
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Now try it with melted butter.