Review: A Most Violent Year. Does JC Chandor Stay True to Form?

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year, directed by JC Chandor. Image courtesy of A24.

Director JC Chandor has a history of making critically lauded films that I think are very bad, like Margin Call. Although I haven’t seen it, people seemed to think All Is Lost was quite good, even though to me it appears to be a movie where Robert Redford is on a boat being splashed with water for 2 hours. Am I missing something here?

A Most Violent Year, released in 2014 and drawing on some of America’s Best Acting Talent, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, was also well regarded by critics. I… kind of liked it. The performances are really good (I mean, when Albert Brooks is basically playing a tertiary role, you know your cast is good). It’s set in 1980s New York, and I liked the way it shot the city with a kind of deflated vibe. Visually, the world of this film is not particularly inviting.

In fact, it is very cold. And that is by design, as the film’s direction and visual style is consciously very taut, very tight and very controlled. And also very slow. And also very boring. Is that fatal to what the movie is trying to do? I’m still somewhat unsure.

This is meant to be a film about The American Dream, and about the compromises people either choose or are forced to make in pursuit of that Dream. The plot is very boring on paper (and, also, in reality). It’s about a group of heating oil companies competing with one another for territory, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. In perhaps the film’s most subtle yet accurate criticism of American style capitalism, almost all of them inherited the companies from their parents, underlining the way wealth is created and then kept in the family in this country.

But there is a new up-start, Abel, played by Oscar Isaac, who pulled himself up by his bootstraps through hard work, charm and hitting the pavement, and he’s now butting in on his competitors territory. They are clapping back by hijacking his trucks and other violent means, but he refuses on general principle to meet violence with violence or involve the Mafia. And… that’s about it. The movie is about this slightly morally compromised American businessman sticking by his morals in the face of temptation. And, you know… that’s pretty much it. That’s all it’s about.

Which really gets at the true question asked by this film: in a moral universe, where the choice between the right and the wrong path is dictated by the scruples of men, did this film really need to be over 2 hours long?