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Unhinged: Russell Crowe's Character Backstory Explained
Here's a breakdown of the backstory for Russell Crowe's character Tom in his new thriller, Unhinged. The Oscar-winner is far from a stranger to playing bad-tempered and/or violent men on the big screen (to say nothing of his much-publicized personal behavior in the past), as evidenced by his roles in films like Winter's Tale, The Nice Guys, and The Mummy. More recently, Crowe landed a Golden Globe for his performance as a real-life disreputable figure in The Loudest Voice, a Showtime miniseries about the late Fox New chairman and CEO Roger Ailes' sexual harassment scandal.
In his latest film Unhinged, Crowe plays a particularly rage-fueled middle-aged man who identifies himself as Tom Cooper, though he's only referred to as "Man" in the movie's credits. Written by Carl Ellsworth (Red Eye) and directed by Derrick Borte (American Dreamer), the thriller costars Caren Pistorius as Rachel Hunter, an everyday working-class woman who's in the middle of a divorce and driving her son, Kyle (Gabriel Bateman), to school when she has a minor altercation with Tom after he refuses to move his truck forward at a green-light. Rather than leaving it at that, Rachel becomes the target of Tom's wrath when he decides to teach her a very twisted lesson.
As evidenced by the character's nondescript listing in the credits, there's a lot about Tom that's kept intentionally vague throughout Unhinged. At the same time, the movie provides enough information (often through background sources) for viewers to put together a rough picture of who he is, what led him to snap, and why he's so obsessed with Rachel.
What Unhinged Reveals About Tom
The film opens with a prologue in which Tom is shown breaking into some unidentified house, killing its occupants with a hammer, lighting it on fire, and calming driving away as it erupts into flames. It's a good example of what Alfred Hitchcock was talking about when he famously described the difference between surprise and suspense-driven storytelling; by the time Tom and Rachel cross paths, the audience always knows he's a killer and is trapped waiting for the other shoe to drop after Rachel honks her horn and yells at him. The tension only continues to grow from there, once she refuses to apologize to him when he pulls up in his truck next to her and Kyle and politely, though more than just a little menacingly, asks if they can wipe the slate clean.
Much of everything else the audience is told about Tom is relayed through news reports watched by Kyle and, later, Rachel's brother Fred (Austin P. McKenzie). Among other things, they reveal the house Tom burnt down belonged to his ex-wife (who was one of the people he killed in the prologue), marking the culmination of twelve months of domestic disturbances caused by Tom, who is said to have a history of "substance abuse and violence." It eventually comes to light that Tom once worked at an auto plant in middle-management and was fired just short of his pension a year ago. He has struggled to find steady work since then, and had only just been let go a day earlier from the maintenance company where he'd been employed for less than a month.
Why Tom Decides To Target Rachel
At first, Tom's decision to target Rachel is purely random. He's obviously reached his breaking point after everything that's happened to him over the last year (by the sound of it, he was already hot-tempered and not-so mentally stable before all that, anyway), leading him to snap and murder his ex-wife in the first place. Seemingly determined to go out in a blaze and not caring whether he takes anyone else down with him, Tom's minor interaction with Rachel is enough to convince him she needs to be a taught a lesson in what a "bad day" truly is, as he tells her at one point. The more he learns about her, though, the more he becomes convinced he's absolutely justified in what he's doing. As he sees it, she was probably the problem in her marriage (not her husband), is otherwise incapable of taking personal responsibility for her mistakes, and is just the latest in a long line of people (especially women) who thinks they can just walk all over him, rather than affording him the respect he believes he's owed.
It's readily apparent Tom is projecting his insecurities about his own shortcomings (not only as a husband, but just as a person) onto Rachel. She's presumably one of the few people he's had power over in quite a while and he relishes in the opportunity to terrorize her by hurting and/or killing those she cares about, as opposed to showing her the compassion and empathy that've been denied to him in the past (specifically, by whoever fired him before he could begin preparing for his retirement). Because Unhinged paints Tom's backstory in broad strokes, it's impossible to say just how much personal responsibility he has for his various misfortunes versus how many of them were others' doing. But in the end, that doesn't really matter: Tom is determined to punish Rachel for any and all slights he feels he's suffered (real or imaginary), no matter the cost.
