A Most Violent Year (MA). Director: J. C. Chandor. Starring: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo, Alessandro Nivol. 124 minutes
In 2012 debutante filmmaker J. C. Chandor emerged with a remarkably absorbing drama, set at a fictional Wall Street investment bank (loosely based on Lehman Brothers) on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis. More of a philosophical horror story than a cautionary tale, Margin Call found the unwitting architects of the crisis contemplating the impending catastrophe, and dissecting the economics of greed and self-interest that had brought them inevitably to the brink.
Where Margin Call was a thriller whose suspense emanated from its dismantling of economic wisdom, Chandor's 2014 follow-up, All Is Lost, was pure white-knuckle action. Robert Redford starred as a solo yachtsman stranded on the Indian Ocean after his yacht is damaged in a collision with a stray shipping container (literally, the detritus of consumer culure). With his navigation equipment and radio disabled and his yacht succumbing to the depths, he must rely on his instincts and resourcefulness to survive.
Chandor's latest, A Most Violent Year, bears most obvious comparison to Margin Call, and can sensibly be approached as a companion piece to that film. Each offers a grim consideration of a different face of the American Dream: in Margin Call, of the Wall Street brats who have made their fortunes buying and selling the idea of money; in A Most Violent Year, of a migrant and self-made man — the hard-working head (played by Isaac) of a heating oil company in 1981 New York.
Yet Isaac's Abel Morales is also in many ways a version of Redford's luckless but determined hero, who maintains both dignity and humanity as circumstances and his environment seem to conspire against him. As the film opens he, with his wife, Anna (Chastain), is in the process of purchasing a riverside facility that he believes will give his business a considerable advantage over its competitors. Like a solo yacht trip, it's a risky venture that promises considerable returns.
Recently, however, their business has suffered a series of violent robberies. As a result Abel is under pressure from a surly union head to illegally arm his truck drivers, something that the morally upright businessman refuses to do. At the same time, they are under scrutiny from ambitious Assistant District Attorney Lawrence (Oyelowo), who is trying to clean up an industry notorious for its corruption and connections to organised crime. Abel