A MOST VIOLENT YEAR: brooding, well-acted but underwhelming

Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain in A MOST VIOLENT YEAR
Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain in A MOST VIOLENT YEAR

In the brooding drama A Most Violent Year, a businessman (Oscar Isaac) risks everything on a big deal and must fight against time to save it as competitors, criminals and an ambitious prosecutor all try to rip it from his grasp.  The guy is principled and a bit of a Boy Scout, and he handicaps himself by refusing to get dirty – even though he trades in a rough-and-tumble (and generally corrupt) industry.  Fortunately, his wife and business partner Jessica Chastain is the daughter of a mobster and his in-house lawyer (Albert Brooks) is an unapologetic crook.

Two things work really well in A Most Violent Year.  The first is the exceptional evocation of time and place.  We are taken back to New York City in 1981, when it had all the trappings of a failed state, including a breakdown in the rule of law.  As the movie takes us between weed-overgrown industrial locations, we drift into the dingy and the sinister.

The second triumph is the acting.  Of course, Chastain is always wonderful, even if she is a little underused here; her character is delightfully tougher and more realistic than her hubbie.  David Oyelowo is very good as the cynical prosecutor who becomes mournfully sympathetic to the naive protagonist. Albert Brooks, Peter Gerety (superb as the bartender in the otherwise dreadful God’s Pocket) and Jerry Adler (Hesh in The Sopranos) bring a spark to their smaller parts.  Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis, The Two Faces of January) adds smoldering intensity, but he’s overshadowed by the ensemble.

The splashiest performance is by Elyes Gabel as an immigrant trying to leverage a truck driving job into the American Dream who finds himself plunged by circumstance into increasingly desperate straits.  Gabel perfectly modulates his performance as a guy who starts out modestly hopeful, then becomes traumatized and just hangs on to a semblance of emotional balance, and finally, his future unhinged by rotten luck, implodes.

However, I was underwhelmed by the story.  Even though there’s a ticking clock element and a whodunit, it’s just not gripping enough to take this drama into psychological thriller territory.  And there are some distracting holes in the plot (see Spoiler Alert below if you must).  This is a disappointment after writer-director J.C. Chandor’s excellent first two films, Margin Call and All Is Lost.

While not a Must See, A Most Violent Year is still a successful drama, adorned by another flawless turn by Jessica Chastain.

SPOILER ALERT: [If the truck hijackers are really “working for themselves” and not one of Abel’s competitors, then they should only be stealing oil – so who is prowling around Abel’s house with a gun and who is attacking his sales force?   And who makes a real estate purchase with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and lets the seller leave with BOTH the money and the only copy of the signed contract – twice?]

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