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Film review: ‘A Most Violent Year’ explores dark side of success

The film is much more than a gangster film. It’s a serious work that deals with the dark side of the American success story.
A Most Violent Year

Director: J.C. Chandor

Starring: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, and David Oyelowo

Writer-director J.C Chandor, who made the very knowing Wall Street thriller, Margin Call, and the virtuosic but tedious Robert Redford-starring All is Lost, has made a third film set in New York in 1981.

A Most Violent Year is much less about the nature of a city spiraling out of control during a year when incidences of violent crime hit a record high, than about an immigrant, Columbian-born businessman, Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac, appearing in almost in every scene), who hungrily pursues the American Dream. In fact, besides using outer borough city locations like elevated subway stations, and walking through squalid graffiti-saturated subway cars, the atmosphere of the city in that dark period is barely evoked.

Abel, who is manicured and wears a camelhair coat and black turtleneck is in the heating fuel business, and is about to purchase a lot on the Brooklyn waterfront that will make his business much more profitable. However, he has problems. Abel must deal with someone brutally assaulting his drivers and making off with their trucks, each containing several thousand dollars worth of oil. Meanwhile, a politically ambitious assistant district attorney (Selma’s David Oyelowo in an undeveloped role) has decided to investigate an industry given to all sorts of chicanery and illegal behavior, which Abel himself is not totally free of.

Jessica Chastain as Anna, daughter of a mobster.
Jessica Chastain as Anna, daughter of a mobster.

Abel and his Brooklyn-accented, mob-daughter wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) are trying to live an upscale, nouveau riche life in a suburban mansion. Anna at moments channels her tough moll persona prodding Abel to take action: “You’re not going to like what’ll happen if I get involved.” But her toughness is never fully sustained — though she has one well-wrought scene where she treats the police with cool contempt when they come to the house to investigate Abel business’s books. The film just doesn’t give her much more to do but be a stylish, tougher than usual helpmate.

It’s the melancholy, soulful, driven Abel (looking a bit like Al Pacino in The Godfather) who is at the film’s center. He is frantic with anxiety about not finding money to pay for the lot, and discovering who is behind the hijacking of his trucks. He’s a man who wants to live according to a moral code in a world that doesn’t allow one to go untainted. The film doesn’t attempt to explore the complexities of his inner life, but it powerfully conveys Abel’s dilemma. He is a hard working, decent immigrant obsessed with the American Dream, and that both gives him purpose and almost undermines him and his family’s well being. It moves him down a path where betrayal of his moral sense seems to be the only option.

Oscar Isaac as 'Abel, and Jessica Chasten as Anna.
Oscar Isaac as ‘Abel, and Jessica Chasten as Anna.

Though the film isn’t particularly violent, Abel’s moral dilemma is at times subsumed in a shootout on a bridge, and his pursuit of a thief along a rail line and through subway cars. Both scenes are excitingly edited, but the film’s more serious ambitions are dropped in the process.

Still, the film is much more than a gangster film. It’s a serious work that deals with the dark side of the American success story. That dark side can be strikingly seen when one of Abel’s drivers, a Latino immigrant Julian (Eleys Gabel) who sees him as a model he wishes to emulate, commits suicide because he senses success is out of his reach, and that his life is without alternatives.

By the conclusion, Abel’s difficulties are resolved, but not without some weakening of his moral code. The film implies that this is what the kind of success Abel is pursuing ultimately demands. Chandor could have done more with his material; there are tragic elements inherent in this story. But he does well enough.

A Most Violent Year opens Friday (January 30) at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington. Click here for show times.

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