A Most Violent Year cheats to tell you about honesty
Lately, I’ve been thinking more about what happens when you watch a movie a second or a third time. What happens when you talk back to it. Sometimes it’s a conversation. Tell me a little more, you ask, and the movie, with some study, reveals something else. Sometimes, what you’re looking at doesn’t yield to questioning, and you second-guess your first impressions.
Well, I do, anyway — most recently with writer-director J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, an efficient, evocative meditation on … power? Yes, I thought, when I saw it in December — power, and probably ethics and honesty and money, too. But mostly I walked out of the screening pleased at not having seen certain moments coming, at the efficiency (of the storytelling, of the acting, of Chandor’s direction) and at having had things — whatever they were — evoked. Such qualities count. They are the missing ingredients people refer to when they complain that not enough movies are made now “for adults.” Such qualities — efficiency and evocation, unified as trust that the audience doesn’t need its collective hand held by pages of backstory (Chandor, in interviews, talks about backstory as a foe), and the sensation that courses through you when you can’t fully predict a story’s outcome — flatter you, even if they don’t necessarily add up.
No longer sure what had been totaled for me when I bought into Year — for one thing, it’s way closer to, like, A Most Violent Month or A Rough Fortnight and Change or A Month of Expensive Lessons and a Box of Band-Aids — I watched it a second time. And I still couldn’t determine precisely what Chandor was saying about power, ethics and money.
There was still considerable efficiency, especially in the acting. Oscar Isaac, fearlessly abrasive in 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis, is hypnotically still here in the lead, a fine actor becoming a major presence with one role. Jessica Chastain tests him with a showy, all-over-the-place performance as his showy, all-over-the-place wife. Chastain isn’t much less broad here than she was in The Help; she’s part brilliant embodiment, part Lifetime movie. Albert Brooks, borrowing Russell Crowe’s hair from The Insider, and David Oyelowo, hardly recognizable from Selma, underplay smartly.
So there was the efficiency, but what about the rest? Still wondering, I chased Year with a second viewing of Chandor’s debut, 2011’s Margin Call, which I’d also heartily bought into at the time, and then told other people to buy, too, as though I were recommending a stock about to explode.
It, like Year, is exceptionally entertaining the first time and then merely very entertaining a second time. Yet what you see when you start asking questions is that Chandor cheats. He helps his characters along with small deus ex machina moments that feel tense but are, in fact, convenient in ways that run counter to the ruthless environment being posited. It works, but mostly because Chandor bends his rules in the first and second acts rather than during the climax. (He’s not above that, though. See his second feature, All Is Lost, in which a wordless Robert Redford finds himself trapped in a potentially fatal Viagra commercial.) He tells them yes even when the story says no.
Year‘s sneaks are small, but they stand out once you know its characters’ fates. An example (one that spoils nothing): When the protagonist, Abel Morales — the ambitious head of a heating-oil company who wants to crush his competitors through solely legal means — faces a corruption sting, his wife, Anna, who has kept the company’s books, wants more time to go over her work when the authorities arrive. So the couple scrambles together to hide about a dozen banker’s boxes. They set them under a balcony, just outside their sleek new mansion. The rest of the movie depends on this particular search warrant being executed with conspicuous laziness, and that’s just what happens. No problem. Ditto a few other encounters that, distractingly, swing Abel’s way.
Those moments swing toward Abel but may remain out of reach. He is presented as true, yes, and that has been been in Chandor’s work all along: a self-ideal centered on honesty. But Chandor’s people also find common ground in their stubborn belief that skill and honesty add up to a winning truth. They don’t, of course — unless certain shortcuts are accepted. Early on, Abel instructs a salesman with Godfather-like gravity: “You will never do anything as hard as looking someone in the eye and telling the truth.” Which is why, in the movies and in life, it doesn’t happen much.
When I Googled that phrase to see if I’d remembered it correctly, the only hit my search returned was a make-your-own-meme site on which someone had lolcatted Abel’s maxim over the character’s face. Whoever did that might not have bothered to watch A Most Violent Year twice — but still got it basically right.
