A Few Thoughts On J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year.
Economical. If ever there was a term to describe the work of J.C. Chandor, the young American auteur who came to prominence with eve-of-disaster Wall Street drama Margin Call, and whose reputation as “one to watch” was cemented with the lone gun Robert Redford chamber-piece-in-an-ocean thriller All Is Lost then “Economical” is it. In his brief career he’s crafted a number of lean, precise pictures that recall the no-nonsense filmmaking of generations ago, his work sitting comfortably next to James Gray in the shadow of Lumet and Coppola.
While A Most Violent Year maintains the core approach of Chandor’s previous films there’s a sense of progression too. It’s a towering, ambitious work, though one with a sense of intimacy. The film’s title refers to things to come. Blood is shed true and proper only in the movie’s closing moments of, an act which acts as the spiritual parting shot for a year that would become infamous in New York gangland history. In this sense the film echoes Chandor’s earlier Margin Call, which looked back at a world in the recent past on the precise verge of financial meltdown (shot in 2011, the film tells the events of the first 36 hours of the financial crisis of 2008). We don’t see the gun fire, but we see the spring coil.
Chandor’s tale is an immigrant story, a dissection of the search for the American Dream, that greatest of products being hawked by the greatest salesmen the world has ever known. Alongside the film’s main protagonist Abel Morales (played by the excellent Oscar Isaac, an immigrant himself), is another incomer to the U.S. of A, and a figure whose own path stands as a cautionary “what if?” alternative life to that which we are more closely following.
Inevitability reigns. The nature of the beast looms low over the movies lead, who, try as he might cannot seem to shake the shadow of expectation. Morales’ background is one interwoven with the crime bosses that run the city of New York, but he seeks another path. Paranoia and conspiracy seep in It’s 80 minutes, three-fifths of the film’s running time, before the typical movie gangster shows up, and even then it’s far from conventional. David Cronenberg’s similarly grandiosely titled A History Of Violence comes to mind, albeit with the notes inverted; rather than running away from his past, Isaac’s hard-working immigrant is trying desperately to dodge what lies ahead of him. It’s Americana carved out of charcoal, the dark heart of a country founded on the uncertainty of the bold and willing.
