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A Most Violent Year – J.C Chandor’s third feature film and
his most ambitious to date – is a chilling morality tale about capitalism and
masculinity. Contemporarily, think Breaking Bad, or Mad Men, or The
Sopranos, even There Will Be Blood. Or go back, to, say, Death of a
Salesman. Nothing excites us more than men going after the American Dream
because – when it’s done right – it punctures a vein and we can’t help
but watch.
Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) – the Colombian-born mogul of a
domestic oil distribution company – is a part of this dynamic conversation. J.C. Chandor doesn’t invent the wheel – far from it. Deep down, I believe he wants
to tell a good story, and for the most part succeeds. Even if A Most Violent
Year doesn’t reach great heights, it’s nonetheless an interesting
period-drama, beautifully-lensed and intelligently-written. To fault Chandor’s auteuristic vision for not painting as full a picture of Abel Morales
as works such as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos have done would be foolish.
This is a vignette, an atmospheric drama, a microcosm of
corruption in a country built on it. Consider the title: I imagine a
British hunter in his living room, getting served tea by his butler, beaver
pelt in hand, commenting “Why, Jeeves, this really has been a most violent
year!” It’s ironic because, despite the admission of violence, no one’s
stopping on account of it. It’s the natural course people who want anything in
life must take.
Chandor loves to make people run. He opens with Abel jogging on his frost-laden, suburban streets. His wife Anna Morales (Jessica Chastain) is a
fusion of Carmela Soprano and Skyler White – she loves her beautiful mansion,
Armani-designed clothes and mid-afternoon glasses of wine. She knows where it
comes from; she’s the accountant of their business
enterprises, taking liberties whenever she can to ensure financial security. She’s
the one who keeps everything afloat. Nonetheless, she’s a side-note to the
drama, not its emotional center.
Meet Julian, Abel's employee who hauls around oil throughout the
dangerous highways of New York. As we learn earlier, criminals broke into Julian's truck, beat him and stole the supply. Julian, days later, notices two men approaching. Scared, he pulls out his gun and
starts shooting at them to protect himself. But he runs, in an emotionally gripping moment,
Chandor illustrates his ability to elicit high-stakes with masterful camera
work, placing this frightened man against the backdrop of the New York
high-rises. It’s suggesting that no one – even those most hurt by the
consequences of capitalism – can escape its menacing grasp.
This puts Abel – who hired Julian and armed him – in a bad
position. Even worse, he’s being investigated. All this, when he wants to close on a
strategic property to store and manage his oil refinery. His bank abandons him
and he’s left to come up with the money by himself. The movie’s story revolves around him gaining access to his money – without it, he loses a
significant fortune.
But the film, despite well-written dialogue and a contemplative approach, lacks suspense. Lawrence (David Oyelowo), for instance, is the man leading the investigation on Abel – but
he’s collected, aware that this is a job and not a moralistic quest to bring
Abel to justice. There’s a naturalism here that is refreshing in theory, but
doesn’t yield anything especially engaging.
Chandor places his characters against backdrops which are
larger than life – Margin Call (the financial crisis), All is Lost (the sea), -
and here we have New York, where Abel, like many other entrepreneurs,
is a cog in the city’s larger system. A director with a naturalistic edge,
with a documentarian’s eye rather than a humanistic one, Chandor does a good
job of dissecting these ideas in a compelling manner.
The movie is a commentary about how violence is an
afterthought, a necessity to achieve the next step of one’s career. Wealth is
built on plunder, and that’s particularly true for why Chandor builds his
characters the way he does. But the movie’s faults are encapsulated in Oscar
Isaac’s performance: very subdued,
restrained, pragmatic and – in his cruelest and most powerful moments - opaque.
Oscar Isaac wasn’t interesting – he wasn’t bad, but the writing didn’t serve
him to go to the next step and take on a strong point-of-view. Abel's pragmatism forced Isaac to internalize the most interesting aspects of his
character – that he is, like capitalism itself, devoid of empathy.
Yet Chandor tries to shade him with dimension, which I think
is the right choice if one not fully-committed to. I wouldn’t have had such a
problem with Isaac if Chandor had a clear vision for Abel; instead the reticent
insistence that this man is “complex” was irritating after awhile. Often, even
if I felt entertained by the political maneuverings of Abel, I felt like
Chandor was skimming the surface of his psychology.
Chastain seemed as if she was being directed by Todd
Haynes – repressed, distraught, dressed-up like a primma donna, with a glass of
wine in hand and hungry for power in a man’s world. She was a peripheral presence,
and watching Isaac and Chastain work off each other felt like unsatisfying
melodrama. Once again, Chandor’s writing is skimming the surface of what could
be an interesting play of power between the husband and the wife.
The FBI investigation was also oddly-written as well – it
felt obligatory, rather than stemming from some place of
necessity and dramatic vitality. Oyelowo was good – but, who am I
kidding, it’s a thin role.
The movie strikes gold in its final moments – and kind of
made me realize what the film was lacking but also doing right. Julian, stripped of everything, faces Abel with a gun. But he
kills himself, puncturing an oil barrel in the process, with Abel unable to turn away. Abel's subsequent actions are practically monotonous: he simply gets a tissue and plugs in the leak, blood stained against the wall. Blood and
oil, blood and oil - this climax was poetically-framed and superbly-written by Chandor. It’s
where I believe his heart as a filmmaker lies – in that ability to show us
human sorrow through an unrelenting camera.
Chandor needs to narrow the canvas a bit, and get out of his
head. He has a good instinct and eye. Hs chase scenes are well done and a pleasure to watch. As I mentioned before, the movie does a fantastic job of dragging
you into those moment of suspense. The earnest boy who’s making his first sale
is – wham! – knocked out and thrown in a ditch; watching Abel pistol-whip the
thief: that stuff is juicy. But without passion that isn’t cerebral, I’m afraid
I can’t call him a “great” director just yet.
Grade: B
David's review, similar grade but for very different reasons, is here.
Grade: B
David's review, similar grade but for very different reasons, is here.