In his collaborations with David Cronenberg, Viggo Mortensen's characters are animated by an inability to move on.
The films of David Cronenberg are often defined by moments of visceral transformation or sudden violence. The exploding heads in Scanners; the surreal body horror of Videodrome, or the monstrous “psychoplasmics” of The Brood, where the release of emotions lead to bizarre physical transformations. Yet this impulse towards transformation and the question of what causes someone to change into some new version of themselves still animates the Cronenberg films that exist outside of the horror genre. In fact, it seems most alive and electric in the director’s collaborations with Viggo Mortensen – a series of films that let the actor embrace his inner sicko, and explore the ideas that have been a part of Cronenberg’s body of work for decades in new, surprising ways.
A Dangerous Method – a film about the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud that gave birth to modern psychoanalysis – was atypical for Cronenberg in its restrained period drama execution, but its themes are familiar to his oeuvre. In one scene, Jung (Michael Fassbender) describes one of his dreams to Freud (Mortensen): A figure shambling towards him on the Swiss/Austrian border (Jung is Swiss, and Freud is Austrian), who he calls “a ghost who still hasn’t figured out how to die properly.” While Freud interprets this dream as being about his relationship with the younger man, and the idea that Freud and his ideas are already relics of the past, that image seems to haunt the characters in all of Mortensen’s collaborations with Cronenberg, as he embodies a series of men who don’t know how to lay themselves to rest. It’s tempting to look at their four films together as an arc with this idea in mind, with Tom Stall’s return to his violent past in A History of Violence at one end and performance artist Saul’s fate in Crimes of the Future at the other. Together they form a series of men whose relationships to their old selves, and their potential future, are articulated through bodily extremes and violent gestures of refusal.
This inability to be free of the past is at its most visceral in A History of Violence, not just because the ugliness of Tom Stall’s old life as hitman Joey Cusack returns to haunt him through an act of violence, but because that past stalks Tom and his family even after he’s attempted to leave his old self behind. There’s a chilling tension in the film’s final moments: Tom arrives home to his family, who are sitting down for dinner, but this is no moment of triumphant return. A gulf has been created between him and them, even as his children hand him communal plates of food as a gesture of inclusion. While Joey Cusack no longer haunts Tom, his shadow has been cast over the rest of the family, and – since this is a Cronenberg film – the language of the body is everywhere in the way that we understand this transformation.
In A History of Violence there are two sex scenes; the first is playful, funny, flirtatious (brought about by the idea that, as Tom’s wife Edie puts it, the two of them “never got to be teenagers together”), while the second is tense, uncertain and full of moments that blur the line between violence and desire. This transformation exists in Mortensen’s performance too; he becomes tighter and more closed in on himself, often bursting out in violence like a coiled predator. In one scene Tom strikes his son, voice quivering in the build-up but the movement of his hand is instinctive, as if his old self is literally fighting for dominance over the man he’s tried to become.
Throughout these performances something chameleonic about Mortensen as an actor materialises. There’s a softness to the way he carries himself as Tom Stall and yet, when he plays the Russian mobster Nikolai in Eastern Promises, his features seem sharper and more threatening. That sense of a changed self desperately clawing towards the surface plays out through more internal ways in each story; the gradual encroachment of Tom’s old life in Philly on his quiet, suburban existence is defined by the idea that the killer Joey Cusack is asleep somewhere deep inside him, waiting to be woken up. As Carl Foggarty, a man from his past, insists to Edie, “I know what’s inside him, what makes him tick. He’s still the same guy.” Tom’s tragedy is that this might be true; the moment before he strikes his son, he insists “in this family, we don’t solve our problems by hitting people,” but violence still pours out of him.
Meanwhile Nikolai’s identity (something that reads as static at the beginning of Eastern Promises) is bound up in his body, his inner conflict simmering beneath the surface as the camera pays close, intimate attention to the tattoos that cover him – symbols of his place within the hierarchy of the Russian mob. Going one further, the film’s iconic fistfight in the public baths sees Mortensen bare all. We see all the things that make up Nikolai’s physical condition – his muscles, his bruises, his tattoos – and recognise that these are all symbols of something that he no longer wants to be.
Tom and Nikolai are characters who exist in an uncertain space; not only are they haunted by the past, but they seem to live in fear of what lies beyond their established sense of self. At the end of A History of Violence, this fear is infectious, having taken root in the rest of the Stall family and the literal darkness of the home that Tom returns to, whereas in A Dangerous Method, it’s more rooted in the individual. Freud grapples with his gradual loss of authority over the world of psychoanalysis (and Jung specifically), although the idea that Freud’s ideas are dying is also manifested through his body when he collapses at an academic conference. This uncertainty also manifests in Mortensen’s performances – in Eastern Promises as Nikolai reads the diary of a teenage girl who died giving birth to the child of one of his criminal contemporaries, he’s always alone, dimly lit. There’s a tension at the core of Viggo’s acting; Nikolai is shown to be a character who never knows exactly how much genuine emotion he’s able to display, constantly seeming to fear surveillance both from the mob that he exists within and the outside forces keeping a close eye on him. Nikolai’s sense of self exists in a fundamentally uncertain place, fluctuating between something real and something performed. Compounding this uncertainty, the characters Viggo plays often find themselves standing on a threshold at the end of these films: between duty and power in Eastern Promises, or life and death in Crimes of the Future.
Crimes of the Future is the Mortensen and Cronenberg collaboration that has the most in common with the director’s earlier genre-defining body horror films, and yet, despite its focus on physical transformation and the threat of regulation on non-normative bodies (as in Videodrome or The Fly), the film feels like an evolution of the relationship between star and director. The small and powerful transformations in Mortensen’s physicality – Saul is all tension and nervous tics, his body literally at war with him as it mutates and grows new organs – anchor a character study of someone who doesn’t know how to die yet.
Mortensen’s characters in these films all feature moments where they exist for other characters to project something onto them (the way Tom performs suburban life and Freud becoming an abstract object in Jung’s dream) but nowhere is this clearer than in the violent spectacles of performance that foregrounds Saul’s changing body and the constant ways in which he’s made and remade anew. A similar observation comes in A History of Violence, as Tom tries to explain his former life as Joey to his wife, he confesses to her, “I wasn’t really born again until I met you.” The often tragic uncertainty of these characters is that rebirth alone never seems to be enough.
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