"A Most Violent Year"

From the increasing reverence that has characterized mainstream media outlets’ reception of each new J. C. Chandor film, you’d think he was one of contemporary American cinema’s greatest artists. After Margin Call’s Oscar-nominated screenplay wowed enough critics with its sympathetic insider’s perspective on a broken financial system to make them overlook its formal inadequacies, All Is Lost’s novel blend of humanism (symbolized by the ingenious casting of all-American liberal icon Robert Redford) and vaguely Herzogian nihilism proved Chandor to possess an indisputable degree of talent that doesn’t always rise above his given objectives. An assessment that his most recent film, 2014’s A Most Violent Year, confirms even as it evidences continued progress in the visual implementation of his ideas.

All three of J. C. Chandor’s feature films share a common attempt at examining the myth of American individualism by pitting its representatives against the unseen and uncontrollable forces of an all-powerful system. In each case, the individual in question’s own hubris is largely responsible for bringing them in the heart of the storm. In A Most Violent Year, that person is Abel Morales, owner of a growing oil supply business only a million and a half dollars away from being truly independent. Conscientious, scrupulous and earnest to a fault, his commitment to being a late 20^th-century model of the American Dream is exactly what keeps holding him back from responding effectively to the mysterious assaults and hijackings of his truck drivers. As played by Oscar Isaac, he recalls Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone from The Godfather, calmly doing his utmost to play by the rules in a system that demands he break them to survive and prosper.

A most appropriate model that’s one of many Chandor conjures in the hope of aligning his film with the great American crime dramas of the 1970s: Godfather-esque interiors lit with heavy yellow or beige colours – including a restaurant scene that plays out like a cross between the first movie’s restaurant scene and the meeting of the Five Families, a cold and inhospitable New York reminiscent of Serpico, a late car chase whose tightening spaces and dirty industrial areas evokes The French Connection until a combination of dark tunnels and red lights turn it into a nightmare… There’s a myriad of visual and structural callbacks that suggest an ambition on Chandor’s part to align his story with many other films that used organized street crime narratives – often based on true stories – to interrogate American identity. The last notable film of such a kind was Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers, which tried to create a modern Jewish tragedy by linking assimilation to crime as a means to secure a rite of passage into adulthood. Although pertinent at times, it yielded mixed results.

A Most Violent Year, whose gently pressuring Hasidic landlords serve a purpose similar to that of the orthodox patriarchs in Holly Rollers, does a better job of laying out its characters’ conflicting desires but similarly falls short of its lofty ambitions. The blame goes partly to Chandor’s unsteady, occasionally shallow direction; he’s certainly grown more adventurous since Margin Call, but he’s retained his penchant for making his composition and framing choices speak over his actors rather than in concordance with them. Scenes of Abel’s wife Anna (the ever talented Jessica Chastain) pressuring him to conform to the image of a traditional American patriarch – armed, ready to use violence and get his hands dirty to protect his family/property – have the workings of classic American gangster tragedy (think White Heat or Mystic River) but, good as his actors’ performances may individually be, Chandor seems to have trouble bringing out their driving impulses in a truly significant way. When the climax sees Anna use an unsuspected last-resort measure to pull her husband out of trouble, the effect should be one of shocking triple revelations – of her actions, of herself and of the couple’s marriage; what we get instead amounts, emotionally speaking, to little more than a deus ex machina.

J. C. Chandor is evidently an intelligent and thoughtful filmmaker who knows and understands his references. As always, he directs his actors very well – even though many here, such as David Oyelowo as a sympathetic but inflexible D. A., are underused – and scenes such as Abel’s discussion with the sister of a fugitive truck driver prove that he can succeed at taking his audience and characters to the exact emotional places they need to be. But it’s perhaps quite telling that his only effective dissection of the myth of rugged American individualism so far has been a metaphorical one, whose spaces diminished as the stakes increased.