A Most Violent Year explores the question of how dirty you’ll allow your hands to get in your effort to achieve the success you desire with a clear conscience. Center stage, soiling his hands and yet not entirely ready to admit it, is Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), a small-time heating oil distributor facing issues with his competitors, the district attorney (David Oyelowo) and the banks. A little more comfortable with dealing with reality is Abel’s wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain), the two having worked side-by-side for years, taking over the business from her father and finally looking to turn the small family business into something much bigger as the film opens with Abel making a deal to purchase an oil holding facility along the water. Abel’s mounting troubles, however, are likely to make finalizing that deal a little harder.
Where the film’s ominous title comes into play is in its setting. The year is 1981, a year writer/director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, All is Lost) learned was, statistically, one of the most violent in New York City’s history. He uses this idea as a backdrop, though almost more as an irony, creating a throwback feature fans of the likes of Sidney Lumet will surely appreciate and A24 has certainly embraced that in the marketing as much as Director of Photography Bradford Young (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) embraced it in his bleakly golden lighting and cinematography.
A Most Violent Year is a gangster story as much as a story centered on the heating oil business can be, and yes there are guns, blood, threats, tears and a demand for respect, but don’t let the title and concept mislead you. This is a slow burn, but as much as it plays like a Sidney Lumet feature, and as celebrated as such a concept may be, this feels like “third place” Lumet. It feels like a movie where the concept came first and the story came second. I’d wager the title even came before anything else, and it’s a great title and the story Chandor has crafted is also fascinating in its simplicity. Yet, as much as I admire the effort, it doesn’t entirely work, beginning (and mostly ending) with the relationship between Abel and Anna.
It’s not the performances, Isaac continues to impress, playing Abel with a calm, cool and collected demeanor. A scene where he explains to his team of salesman the art of the sell is truly wonderful and he wears the pain of a man walking the knife’s edge between right and wrong with perfection. Chastain is strong and sometimes scary, though she’s a walking contradiction I was never able to sort out and the chilly friction between Anna and Abel throughout leaves a gaping hole.
My biggest issue, from the absolute very beginning, is the fact I never believed Anna and Abel were married. And it’s not a matter of them having more of a business relationship than a loving one, though that’s entirely true, it’s the way Chandor doesn’t necessarily explore the loving (or lack thereof) aspect of their relationship. It’s almost too cold, too calculated. A Most Violent Year has a realism to it, a matter of fact nature to its storytelling, and yet it felt as if there was an aspect to Anna and Abel, and their relationship, that we as an audience aren’t privy to.
If I were to look for reason for Anna’s actions and cold nature of their relationship, the easiest and most obvious comparison to start with is Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, Chastain’s Anna possessing traits that would make her the iconic “Lady”, but it’s a comparison that bores me, not to mention it just doesn’t entirely ring true. Anna is a character where each scene seems to bring out a different personality in her as if Chandor never quite decided what he wanted her to be creating a confusing hodgepodge of “What’s she all about?” as the story itself begins to fall into a rather redundant cycle of rinse and repeat.
This is a movie that feels like it’s trying to be something rather than actually being that something. It feels like a film that wants to be a ’30s gangster film, checking off each box along the way — femme fatale, corruption, foot chase, etc. It’s begging to be compared to the work of Sidney Lumet with a performance from Isaac, as strong as it is, begging to be compared to Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone. In the end, it feels somewhat false, despite having supreme moments of intrigue and plenty of scenes for Isaac, Chastain and a srong supporting cast including Albert Brooks and David Oyelowo, to chew up the scenery.
Despite all this, it’s easy to recognize Chandor as one of today’s best young filmmakers and a filmmaker unafraid to take risk. His debut feature tackled Wall Street with a bunch of talking heads led by an all-star cast and he knocked it out of the park. He dialed it all the way back with his next feature starring Robert Redford alone at sea and now he takes a stab at a period drama that, at the very least, has a whole new generation learning and hopefully exploring some of the great cinema of the ’70s. He’s a director interested in telling stories, not so much interested in box office and for that I respect the hell out of him even if this latest film is a bit of a miss.
