This weekend, Jason and Steph and I saw A History of Violence.The movie's premise is promising. It's based on a high-quality graphic novel, a distinction that seems to be the new badge of edginess for hip young directors. It's getting rave reviews from critics in high places, and its complement of A-list acting talent gives it instant credibility.

The film tells the story of Tom Stall, an all-American dad in a small town whose diner is robbed by two sociopathic thugs. A switch flips, and he saves the lives of his coworkers and customers with a startling display of brutal heroism. He's an instant town celebrity, of course, and the diner's business booms. But there's something unsettling, something off-kilter, about this gentle churchgoing man with a wife and two kids killing would-be robbers with reflexive efficiency. His eyes say it all: there's something more under the surface, and he's tormented by it.

Sound promising? It is. But A History of Violence never delivers. All the complex themes and challenging questions are left as an exercise for the viewer while the film zooms in for an extended closeup of the blood and the screams and the bruised thighs and the spilled brains of brutal sex and violence. It'd be a shame, after all, to spend valuable screen time exploring the nature of man or the morality and ethics of violence when you could just show, say, Tom inexplicably raping his wife or closeups of someone's jawless face gurgling.

This is a film based on a graphic novel in the worst possible ways. It reminds me how easy of a ride most graphic novels get: they're considered deep if they even hint at moral complexity, but few are ever expected to do the hard work of exploring those themes in the actual work itself. In this way, A History of Violence also reveals precisely what's rotten at the core of the comic and graphic novel industry that spawned its story in the first place.

I'll be writing more shortly -- it'll have spoilers, so if you really want to see the film, don't click any farther.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.