Cine Me

A Most Violent Year

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2937898/

http://amostviolentyear.com/

There's a kind of 1970s American movie that's catnip to directors who grew up in the '80s and '90s while watching that sort of movie on cable TV and home video. It's visually and thematically dark, and very male. It has Rembrandt lighting and a palette dominated by paper-bag brown, burnt yellow, leprous emerald, and dirty cream. There's talk of honor and integrity and tradition, of old ways passing and a meaner, pettier, more chaotic, new way taking its place. It is an organized crime film, or a family drama, or a big city nightmare, or all three things at once. Nobody in it is conventionally likable. The hero, despite a certain reticence about selling what's left of his soul, soon figures out that to get ahead in this world, you have to be cold and calculating, and divest yourself of illusions. "A Most Violent Year," a 1981 New York period piece written and directed by J.C. Chandor ("All is Lost," "Margin Call"), is that kind of movie. Oh, boy, is it that kind of movie. It's quite good, for what it is. But it's that "for what it is" part that proves slightly exasperating.

The film's title refers to an actual, statistical designation: 1981 was the most violent year in New York City history up till that point, with 1,841 homicides (the number climbed through 1991 before starting to level off). Coupled with the retro look and rhythm and subject matter—the film is a dirty business movie, a crime film, a crusading New York DA story, and a visual homage to cinematographer Gordon Willis ("The Godfather," "The Conversation"), and a lot of other '70s-film signifiers as well—it all feels like a romanticization of a past which, through a twenty-teens, American middle-class filmmaker's eyes, looks like a Brigadoon of urban ethnic machismo. The movie is so funereal that at times it plays like a memorial service, not just for a particular kind of American drama, but for the male heroes who populated them: a snapshot of one of the last cultural moments when American men could be Men, in that old fashioned, two-fisted, furrowed-brow-and-whispered-threats sort of way. 

The movie is devoted to the scrappy side of fortune-building at the end of the industrial age.

The glory of “A Most Violent Year” lies in Chandor’s sense of how a certain corner of the world (and, by implication, a much larger portion of it) works, for ill or for good.

A tense freeway shootout and car/foot/rail chase sequence aside (the latter plays like a sombre variation on a theme from The French Connection), A Most Violent Year keeps its action tinder largely dry, the fireworks generated instead by tense conversations between husbands and wives, lawyers and district attorneys, police and putative thieves. Chastain is terrific as the Lady Macbeth power behind the throne, chiding the authorities for being “very disrespectful” while cooking the company books with fingernail-saving disdain. Isaac is a portrait of manicured, camel-coated anxiety, a man struggling to maintain his moral-code cool amid overstretched mortgages and 30-day payment deadlines. Top marks, too, to David Oyelowo as the DA whose crime-busting clampdown masks naked political ambition and Albert Brooks as the world-weary, dyspeptic lawyer walking the thin blue line between his client and the authorities.

When “New York, New York” lyricist Fred Ebb wrote that immortal line, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” it’s doubtful he imagined the life-or-death stakes such sentiments take on in “A Most Violent Year,” an ’80s-era NYC crime drama in which just making it from one day to the next seems like a major accomplishment. In his third turn behind the camera, writer-director J.C. Chandor has delivered a tough, gritty, richly atmospheric thriller that lacks some of the formal razzle-dazzle of his solo seafaring epic, “All Is Lost,” but makes up for it with an impressively sustained low-boil tension and the skillful navigating of a complex plot (at least up until a wholly unnecessary last-minute twist). Like last fall’s “Out of the Furnace,” this solid, grown-up movie-movie is almost certainly too dark and moody to connect with a broad mainstream public or make major awards-season waves, but it does much to confirm Chandor as a formidable filmmaking talent, and star Oscar Isaac as one of the essential American actors of the moment. 

The movie is also a triumph of subtle period craftsmanship on almost every level, especially the work of production designer John P. Goldsmith, who has a field day with long-bodied Cadillac coupes and diesel Mercedes, metallic desks and filing cabinets; costume designer Kasia Walicka Mamone, applying bounteous earth tones (with Chastain outfitted by Giorgio Armani); and the great cinematographer Bradford Young (“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”), whose widescreen images are retro without ever verging on kitsch, with ungentrified Gotham locations bathed in a crisp winter’s light and swirls of indoor cigarette smoke.