(USA, 125 min.)
Written and directed by J.C. Chandor
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo,
Albert Brooks, Alessandro Nivola, Elyes Gabel, Catalina Sandino Moreno
It’s New York, 1981, and crime in the city is at an all-time
high. Violence, murders, shootings, and such are on the rise, but so too is the
invisible crime that has become the norm in America as private enterprise
evolves as its own kind of organized crime. It’s a disease, American
capitalism, that erupts like Ebola in the year that Ronald Reagan assumes office,
and it corrupts whatever agents approach it with good intentions. Perhaps the
one good man remaining fighting the good fight for the little guys arrives at a
moral crossroads in A Most Violent Year, and trying to win the market with a
good heart seems about as daunting as trying to cure Ebola with a Band-Aid. A Most Violent Year is a searing crime
drama in the vein of GoodFellas and The Godfather, but whereas Bonasera pledges his belief in the American Dream to Don Corleone with an oath that is tangibly
metaphorical, A Most Violent Year
will have audiences shaken because the corruption feels unsettlingly real. This
third feature by maverick writer/director J.C. Chandor (All is Lost)
is a most excellent film.
It’s funny to review J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year so shortly after writing a note of disappointment for Susanne Bier’s Serena. Now here is the scope and sense of empire sorely lacking from Serena’s tale of an ill-fated lumber baron and his wily wife. A Most Violent Year takes the most American commodity of all—oil—okay, the two most American commodities of all—oil and violence—and it builds a world for which criminality and corruption are the foundational elements of an industry. A Most Violent Year takes place in 1981, although it could really be set in any year. A Most Violent Year is palpably resonant as it crafts an engrossing story of one immigrant’s unwavering belief in the American Dream and his rude awakening as he confronts the foundation of said dream and the rules that rig the odds outside of the American Everyman’s favour.
Said aspiring American is Abel Morales (played by Inside Llewyn Davis’s Oscar Isaac), a Hispanic,
although A Most Violent Year doesn’t
note his exact origin and instead allows him to play a kind of everyman
outsider. Abel is building an empire out of the home heating oil company he
runs with his wife and partner, Anna (Jessica Chastain, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby). They’re in the midst of
negotiating some major land deals that will take their business to the next
level when A Most Violent Year begins
and they’re doing business the old-fashioned way with dealings in sketchy rooms
and briefcases full of money. Abel, much like Serena’s George Pemberton, is more than happy to tip the scales,
rig the books, grease some palms, and do things on the hush-hush simply to stay
competitive and allow his superior product to get the edge it needs. Anna, on
the other hand, is a regular Serena. She knows the business inside and out and she
knows that Abel’s morals cannot take them as far as they need to need to go,
although the give them an edge on the competition in the long run. They follow
“industry standards,” Anna fervently insists whenever Abel wonders if they’re
pushing their luck too far, but Anna, the daughter of a crook, knows how far is
too far.
The competition, on the other hand, is becoming fierce. As
the Morales encroach on the competition’s territory to expand, their competitors,
whom Chandor delightfully presents as rival Mafiosi, respond with force. Truck
after truck of Abel’s supply is hijacked during the violent winter of 1981 and
everyone, including Anna and their resident consigliere Andrew (played by a
deliciously slimy Albert Brooks), urges Abel to arm his guards with guns so
that they, too, may survive in the kill or be killed mentality of the game.
Abel’s unwavering belief that a strong work ethic will carry his business
through tough times only amplifies the violence, and A Most Violent Year takes this renegade businessman on a true
descent into the underbelly of American ideology.
Oscar Isaac gives an unwavering performance as Abel. He’s
strong, fierce, and coolly levelheaded. This man has dignity—perfectly embodied
in his fine camel-hair coat that miraculously escapes the film without a
blemish—and Isaac plays Abel with such conviction that he leaves the audience
wanting to believe in the righteousness of a dream they know full well to be a
lie. It’s a commanding performance, a bold new take on a man negotiating the
world of the gangster without getting his hands dirty, relatively speaking.
Chastain is equally fierce as Anna. She owns every scene of
the film in which she appears. Chastain, the motherfucker who found Bin Laden
in Zero Dark Thirty, shows a new layer
of badassdom as she, like Isaac, takes the gangster genre to a new level and
perfectly adds an edge of the gangster’s moll to the all-American housewife.
Take the scene in which she assumes control of the Morales’s empire when the
overzealous prosecutor Lawrence (Selma’s
David Oyelowo) shows up with a warrant at their daughter’s birthday party.
Anna, cool and collected, shows that she’s the true force behind their empire
as she orchestrates their charade of suburban normalcy and then intimidates the
lawyer like a boss. “This was very disrespectful,” she says, twirling her
finger in the, defiantly flicking her cigarette into Lawrence’s cake, and
explaining the goodness that sets Abel apart from people of her breed.
Chastain’s simmering performance gives A
Most Violent Year its greatest intensity and one watches with baited breath
waiting for Anna to explode.
Whereas Serena’s megalomania gets the better of her or even
Lady Macbeth—literature’s greatest power-driven wife—is undone by madness, Anna
never loses herself in her ruthless quest for power. A Most Violent Year calculates Anna’s drive with an intimidating
measure of level-headedness and stability: Chastain makes Anna so terrifying
because the rationality of her actions and her maternal survivalism always remains
clear. Anna knows the rules of the game far better than her husband does, and
this makes her a far stealthier player, as we see by the film’s end. She’s
uncharacteristically strong for a woman in a gangster film: like Lorraine
Bracco’s Karen Hill in GoodFellas,
she’s fully in control of both herself and her family.
A Most Violent Year easily
marks Chandor’s strongest film yet in his third feat as a writer/director.
Chandor, following the talky chamber drama of Margin Call and the near wordless ode of All is Lost, gives this flawless crime drama one of the most potent spins
that the genre has seen in years. A Most
Violent Year, more than any other film this year, truly feels like it’s about something as Chandor examines the
overall pervasiveness of ruthless, unrelenting capitalism perverting anything
it touches. The film has echoes of The
Godfather as it situates Abel’s plight within the scope of Don Corleone’s
America, for Chandor expertly intertwines America’s most prevailing
institutions—oil, family, and crime—within the Morales’s rise to power. The
excellent cinematography by Bradford Young is dark and brooding, while the taut
editing by Ron Patane and the unconventional score by Alex Ebert make A Most Violent Year a heart-poundingly
intense and urgent moral fable. Chandor displays a masterful hand at both genre
and social commentary by making a slow burn of a film in which no outcome is
desirable. There’s no way A Most Violent
Year can end well, for even if Abel and Anna succeed in their deal and the
expansion of their empire, it means the one good man in the system will himself
be corrupted. A Most Violent Year is a
dark, brooding, and powerfully resonant picture—and far and away one of the
year’s best.
Rating: ★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
A Most Violent Year opens in theatres Dec. 31 from A24 Films.
It opens in Canada
beginning in January from Elevation Pictures.