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| /A24 |
A
Most Violent Year is another solid effort from
writer-director J.C. Chandor. The helmer of the Wall Street drama Margin Call has, after the ambitious
one-man show All Is Lost, returned to
his class-conscious, richly-cinematic New York City roots. Though unlike his
debut feature, Chandor’s newest goes beyond the halls of the New York elite,
surveying with great precision the decline of a city holding tight to a
ruthlessly capitalist system breeding corruption, uncertainty and brutal levels
of violence.
If Chandor has yet to make that unequivocally great
movie, his methods of storytelling continue to build in intelligence, in style
and in scope. A Most Violent Year has
some structural problems, and to call it uneven would not be inaccurate, but
this film holds an undeniable power; at is best, it is an appropriately-murky morality
play with a breathtaking performance from Oscar Isaac at its center. The Inside Llewyn Davis alum inhabits the
character of Abel Morales, who immigrated to New York as a child and built
himself into a respected businessman on the verge of mega-success. Chandor sets
his film in 1981, the most historically-violent year in the history of New York
City, and his protagonist Abel is contending with crime-ridden threats to – as
well as exceptional opportunities for – his oil company.
The stage is set for a fascinating interpretation of
the pursuit of success, the relationship between the rise of the top and the decline
of all that are below, and the underlying meaning of that illusive American
Dream. Chandor handles those ideas beautifully. But he also fancies this as a
study of a marriage of mutually-corrupted souls – wife Anna (Jessica Chastain)
is the company’s CFO, its risk-averse half – and a high-wire mix of homage and
playful underpinning of classic gangster cinema. Chandor strains to answer
expectations – this is a crime drama, thus a character must die; our “mobster
wife” must don a fine wardrobe, cigarette and drink in hand, accent
sufficiently thick – and also subvert them, as demonstrated by the film’s
final-act twist.
Best about A
Most Violent Year is its moral grey area. Abel has an ethical code, yet he
is working in a system that is in no small part responsible for the chaotic
violence spreading through the city. Abel treats his workers fairly and with
respect, but he throws them into situations where their lives are put at risk.
Abel is also a faithful husband and father, but his obligations keep him at a
distance from his children, and at odds with his wife. He is, in a sense, the
ideal capitalist success story, as fair and honest as a full-on participant of
the system can be.
Chandor’s point of inquiry, then, must be: is that
good enough? Abel will reject, at every point, overt unethical options – Albert
Brooks nicely underplays as his less morally-conscious partner – but he will
also continue to throw his workers into the arena, push harder even when
threats are made against his family, and refuse to favor compassion over
pragmatism. He is successful both because of his ethical code and his
capitalist sensibilities. Here, Chandor conveys a point-of-view refreshingly in
service of character. There’s never a judgment of Abel – the feel of the film
is cool and leveled, allowing inevitable moral tradeoffs to occur without an
accompanying exclamatory marking.
I love the way Chandor uses this quintessential
capitalist fantasy – the rags-to-riches immigrant – to inject such a scathing,
holistic critique. Despite starting out at the bottom, Abel is rich enough and
powerful enough to distance himself from what he and his fellow moguls have
helped to create – decay. Chandor’s opening, and subsequent motif, is Abel
jogging in a nicely-styled fitness suit. It’s recreational, yes, but he’s also
running from that reality, from what’s increasingly in the distance behind him:
the violence, the uncertainty, the disorder. Looking at A Most Violent Year through a political lens, this is a film
pitting the haves against the have-nots, dissecting their parasitic
relationship. To center that story on Abel is a fascinating choice, then,
because Abel is both intimately connected to, and increasingly distant from,
those “beneath” him. His relationship with a young Hispanic employee,
repeatedly facing the city’s dark underbelly as a part of the job, coldly considers
a core component of capitalist ideology: that those who work hard make it, and
those who do not cannot be helped.
Sometimes, pointed filmmaking like this translates
as pompous and ignorant of character. Not so here. Chandor, as demonstrated
with great vigor in Margin Call, has
superb command of character, and his focus in that regard never wavers. Mr.
Isaac, after such underrated work in Inside
Llewyn Davis last year, once again has crafted a remarkably unique
character, returning to an understated and slow-burn approach but also mining
rich emotional territory as the film raises its stakes. Chandor also works well
with Brooks and David Oyelowo, who again in a small turn – as a District
Attorney looking into Abel’s company – makes a strong impression.
When A Most
Violent Year is good, it glides. But the film loses steam. Chandor hinders
his work by focusing, intermittently yet intently, on Abel’s relationship with
Anna. Ms. Chastain is good here, but she’s surprisingly peripheral and really
fails to register. I recalled Take
Shelter, in which she again played a significant part merely as wife to the
protagonist. In that film, her strength, her compassion, and her vulnerability
integrated beautifully into the film’s whole – mainly because her performance
was so grounded; she felt so authentic. You don’t get that same emotional
involvement here. On the one hand, the promise of Chastain in such a part is misleading,
maybe even for the director himself. It almost feels as if Chandor knows
how good of an actress he’s got, and is straining to give her meaty material
and sufficient screentime (the alternate possibility: some scenes got cut). Regardless,
the final cut of Year strikes a
strange balance. There’s more intrigue here in the partnership than in the
actual marriage, and again, it’s off to the side, not given ample breathing
space or time to develop. In actuality, this is where Chandor goes big: these
scenes are theatrical, emotional and volatile in a way the film most definitely
is not. Whether Chandor wanted more or less here remains to be seen; the end
result is intellectually-intriguing but ultimately ill-fitting.
The general frustration here is the obvious
potential for greatness. Chandor may be among the most exciting, intelligent
and ambitious filmmakers working right now – especially among up-and-comers –
but with A Most Violent Year, he
bites off just a sliver more than he can chew. His handling of moral compromise
and of fatal consequence is beyond impressive – here is that storyteller that
can be both intensely provocative and entertaining – and his films continue to
boast eclectic sensibilities. I’m fascinated by how Alex Ebert’s score uniquely
melds hints of triumphalism that never quite land with bracing suspense; cinematographer
Bradford Young’s work here, meanwhile, is sublime. Yet for a film so rooted in
the grey and so fixed on that ethical line, it’s sorely distracting when
Chandor puts the writing on the wall: when Oyelowo’s D.A. gives the “I’ll
scratch your back if you scratch mine” speech, or when Anna spells out Abel’s
moral conundrum. Thematically, these elements fit, but tonally they jar. At
times, the director is flirting with two approaches, swerving between pointed
statements and textured portraits about the ethical and moral impossibilities
rendered in the pursuit of the Dream.
With Chandor, the intelligence, the cinematic verve,
the purpose – it’s all there. And this film is very, very, very good. It’s
smart and provocative, terrifically-acted and gorgeously-lensed. When this movie
is good, it is fantastic – for 15-20 minutes at a time, it’s absolutely
with the best of the year. But by the film’s end, it’s not – not quite. It’s a
little loose and a tad too unfocused, smart and potent and relevant as it may
be throughout. For better or worse, the legacy of A Most Violent Year may merely be its hinting at what is to come
for the supremely-talented and potential-loaded J.C. Chandor.
Grade: B+