A Most Violent Year
Our newest film auteur, in the style of past decades, where one person writes and directs the movie seems to be J C Chandor. After some years doing commercials, A Most Violent Year is Chandor’s third full length feature that he wrote and directed. The others, Margin Call and All is Lost, have been well received, and Violent is following the same path. In this film, Oscar Issac (The excellent Inside Llewyn Davis) co-stars with Jessica Chastain in a story set in 1981 New York. At that time in real history, New York was in a dive, wracked by corruption, decay, labor racketeering and nearly taken over by crime families, notably the Luchesse family. Many aspects of daily business depended on paying what amounted to a Mafia tax and the crime rate was through the roof. In this brew, Issac’s character, Abel Morales is an ambitious guy, rising in the home heating oil business. Oil delivery trucks are being hijacked and their contents stolen, drivers and sales reps being assaulted and beaten, cops seem unable to do anything. Morales, however, as ambitious and aggressive as he might be, marches to a different drummer and really wants to be an honest dealer and a decent employer. It seems like all of the competition around him is at least somewhat shady, even including his wife and accountant (Chastain), who repeatedly offers to “help” him in the business by contacting people in her family that can make things happen.
Morales, however, will have none of that, even when it threatens him at home and terrifies his wife. In spite of his honesty, he, like almost everybody in NY, is being investigated; prosecutors seem convinced that he’s shady too. The screws get tightened even more when the investigation scares off a banker who was going to lend him money to expand. A risky loan deal has left Morales in need of a lot of money real fast. Either his business will grow or, if he can’t get the money, it will all come down. As the plot moves on, the question that repeatedly appears in the mind of the audience is, at what point will Morales cave; when will he resort to contacting his wife’s shady relatives for that special kind of high-cost help that comes from gangsters. Morales does not want to go down the moral sewer.
I was very impressed with this film. It’s shot with a lot of video, sometimes deliberately grainy and foggy, apparently a metaphor for the moral fog of low-life 1981 New York and received an ACCA nomination for Cinematography. Much of it is very close up, focusing closely on the cost this life is taking on the characters. Some of the grittier scenes in the movie had to be shot in Detroit in order to find enough empty vandalized, decaying, graffiti covered buildings. Much of that environment has been erased, built over or gentrified in contemporary New York. Oscar Issac is excellent, in a fairly low-key but determined role to succeed in business but keep his soul. His scared wife, Anna is portrayed excellently by Jessica Chastain (who won a Golden Globe for this performance). David Oyelowo (Selma) is also quite good as a prosecutor who haunts Morales, thinking he will find something to use against him, but eventually realizing that his IS a good guy. This isn’t an easy or fun movie, but it’s well worth watching. Much of the time, it has a Godfather-Goodfellows look which rubs your face in the stew of corruption and constant threat. Morales is always just a hair’s breath from turning. I was highly impressed.
