J C Chandor (2014)

The title is a statistical statement of fact about crime in New York City in 1981, where and when the story is set.  The action takes place over the course of a few weeks in winter:  the snowy landscape chimes with the moral one; the soundtrack contains repeated news bulletins about the latest killings and robberies that have taken place; but the violent episodes in the film, although startling when they do occur, are few.  A Most Violent Year is a puzzle:  J C Chandor’s screenplay is intelligent and the actors are good but the movie rarely shakes off a prevailing inertia.  It comes to life only in the occasional physical action sequences and these give off a whiff of anxiety on Chandor’s part that he needs to up the ante.  His previous film, All Is Lost, was nearly all action, hardly any words and only one character.  A Most Violent Year differs from its predecessor in all three respects; most of the many conversational exchanges here feel too even-paced, without enough layers or shifts of mood.

As a young man, Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) immigrated to America from Colombia.  Now in his mid-thirties, Abel is a successful businessman in New York, the owner of a heating oil delivery business which he’s set to expand.  He’s in the process of buying a loading and storage dock on the East River; the dock will give Abel easier access to oil barges.  The vendors, garment-district Orthodox Jews, accept a cash down-payment on the understanding that the balance of the purchase, one and a half million dollars, will be paid within thirty days.  Not all is going well for Abel, though.  There are continuing attacks on his delivery trucks by persons unknown (the drivers are forced out of their vehicles from which the oil cargo is then drained); as a result, the truckers’ union is pressuring Abel to arm his drivers with guns.  At the same time, an ambitious assistant district attorney (David Oyelowo) is investigating Abel’s business practices.  As these difficulties intensify and converge, the bank lending him money to complete the purchase of the new site gets cold feet, forcing Abel to find other ways of raising $1.5m in cash as the payment deadline looms.  Abel Morales considers himself to be law-abiding but he operates in a world that’s at best unscrupulous and in which violent criminality is increasingly standard practice.  A Most Violent Year explores whether he can keep his entrepreneurial ambitions afloat without behaving as badly as his business antagonists.

The proximity of organised crime in Abel’s life is symbolised by his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), who keeps the books for her husband’s business and is the daughter of a Brooklyn Mafioso.  The moral scheme of the story is laid out at an early stage and the characters don’t much change their positions.  When Lawrence, the assistant DA, arrives at the Morales’ Westchester home to search the property, Anna tells him that her husband is an honourable man.  In the film’s closing scene, on the dockland site which Abel has finally succeeding in buying, he says to Lawrence, ‘I am not a felon’, and Lawrence replies, ‘No, I guess you’re not’.   In this last exchange, the lawman makes it known that he too has his price – a rare example of J C Chandor going for (and getting) an easy laugh.  He seems determined to avoid the obvious but this parting cheap shot is an example of how he sometimes fails.  His lapses are more jarring than they would be in the work of a consistently less discriminating film-maker; it’s doubly frustrating that his self-discipline is also probably what enervates this movie.  A larger lapse occurs in the subplot concerning Julian (Elyes Gabel), a Hispanic-American truck driver.  This isn’t a bad idea:  Abel himself started off as a driver for the heating oil business before graduating to being a salesman – a path that Julian is keen to follow although Abel doesn’t think he’s ready to do so.  Chandor realises this part of the story crudely and melodramatically, though:  Julian, who appears to be just about the only driver in what’s meant to be a thriving concern, is traumatised by a hold-up; on his first day back in the cabin, he’s held up again and, in the light of the skirmish that follows, goes on the run from the police.  He reappears in the climactic scene on the newly-acquired dockland site.  He threatens Abel, Anna and Abel’s lawyer (Albert Brooks) with a gun before putting a bullet through his own head, staining with his blood the snow-covered ground and the moment of Abel’s triumph.

A more successful episode is Abel’s pursuit of one of the truck hijackers.  As well as being highly and, in the context of the film as a whole, unusually dynamic, this sequence has an element of visual metaphor rather more imaginative than the blood-in-the-snow finale.  Abel, in his immaculate camel-hair coat, chases the man under graffiti-covered railway bridges and across scruffy waste ground – a representation of the underbelly of the world they both inhabit.  (The hero shows considerable stamina in the chase:  I liked this because it gave a retrospective meaning to the early shots of a track-suited Abel jogging near his home – shots which seemed at the time to be no more than filler.)   The production design team, headed by John P Goldsmith, has done fine work:  the NYC external locations and the huge, deathly silent interiors – of Abel’s house, of the stylish fortress inhabited by the unnervingly affable scion of a Mafia family (Alessandro Nivola) – are impressive.

The two Morales children, both girls, are mostly unseen in the arctic vastness of the family home – Abel delivers a large understatement when he says to Anna at one point that he doesn’t seem to have seen the kids for ages.  When the children do appear, it’s to illustrate the collision between their parents’ domestic and professional spheres of existence. One of the daughters discovers a loaded gun outside the house, left behind by a would-be intruder whom Abel chased off.  Lawrence arrives with his search warrant during a children’s birthday party.  These moments naturally call to mind the intersection of family worlds in The Godfather films and Oscar Isaac’s well-groomed Abel faintly suggests Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II but the resemblance can be no more than skin- and sharp suit-deep:  Michael’s expensive clothes and respectable businessman exterior cloaked the vicious corruption that Abel struggles to resist.  Isaac gives a thoughtful and, in some ways, effective performance but it left me wondering if he can carry a film.  As in Inside Llewyn Davis, you’re in no doubt of his talents but he’s opaque.  In contrast to these starring parts, Isaac has been charismatic and convincing in (sizeable) supporting roles in otherwise inferior films (The Two Faces of January, In Secret).   He’s ethnically right here, of course; it feels right too that Abel speaks English somewhat carefully and Isaac is mostly persuasive in his creation of Abel’s professional persona.  He tells his salesmen, in dealing with potential customers, always to extend eye contact beyond what’s comfortable and Isaac demonstrates this advice compellingly:  he’s very good at conveying an authority that’s strong enough not to need to be aggressive.

Oscar Isaac’s square build and large, handsome, irregular features make him fascinating to watch but he doesn’t always give much back, particularly in some of his scenes with Jessica Chastain’s Anna.  This isn’t a problem when Anna’s Lady Macbeth-like decisiveness leaves her husband looking ineffectual but, on the occasions when Abel does get angry, Isaac seems to be raising his voice to compensate for being unable to express what’s inside the character.   Jessica Chastain gives another excellent performance.  Anna is glamorous but there’s a slackness in her face which you come to see as an expression of her lack of moral sense; she’s an often commanding presence yet she seems cheap too.  Chastain captures very well how different Anna is with different people.  Her conversation at the house with Lawrence also shows how sharply Anna’s mood and behaviour will change.  Exposing how Abel’s conscience slows him down, she’s delightedly contemptuous but Chastain makes it clear Anna is still in love with him too.   The strong supporting cast also includes Peter Gerety as the truckers’ union leader and Catalina Sandino Moreno as Julian’s wife.  The dignified, melancholy score is by Alex Ebert.

26 January 2015