A Most Violent Year

In writer-director J.C. Chandor’s film A Most Violent Year, Oscar Isaac plays Abel Morales, an Hispanic immigrant living in New York City in 1981. Morales wants to build his business empire without resorting to the illegal acts of so many of his counterparts, but finds this increasingly difficult when he becomes the target of an ambitious district attorney (David Oyelowo) as well as an unknown thief, who has apparently hired men to steal the gasoline from Abel’s trucks, to the tune of 200,000 dollars-worth of fuel. Abel is about to make a massive real estate purchase—of a shipyard right on the Hudson River—that will ensure the growth of his company, but when his banker reneges on the loan, his wife (played by Jessica Chastain), herself the daughter of a mobster, encourages him to do whatever is necessary—whether legal or not—to obtain the shipyard. This movie is about Abel’s personal struggle to remain legitimate and how such an aspiration seems almost impossible in Abel’s chosen field.

All you need to see is one of the movie trailers for A Most Violent Year to tell that the film has been christened as an important work. It oozes prestige like sap from a massive oak tree. The National Board of Review hailed it as the best film of 2014, and it has garnered a host of other accolades (although Oscar ignored it completely). What’s unfortunate is that A Most Violent Year has some truly fascinating elements that fail to come together, and these elements are further pushed down by the movie’s own heaviness. Chandor, so grimly obsessed with emulating a great 70s movie, has captured none of the vitality of a film like The Godfather or Dog Day Afternoon. He has some wonderful assets, chiefly his star Oscar Isaac, who’s a terrific performer and who can carry a picture like this with ease. Chandor makes him up like a Ken Doll version of a 1970s Al Pacino. Isaac sports a thick wisp of black hair sprinkled with grey, and he strides around in nice-looking suits and a beige trench coat. The look is flawless, almost too flawless; and the movie itself is too perfect, too slick to be what Chandor wants it to be, but also too lifeless.

For one thing, the title A Most Violent Year is misleading. It suggests a catalog of the crimes of 1981, which was apparently a very active year for crime in New York. With such a title and such a time period, we expect the movie to be about the district attorney, but he has relatively little screen time. It’s a clunky, constricting title that again raises our expectations for something grand and definitive. The intriguing element at the heart of J.C. Chandor’s film—the attempted rise of the anti-gangster—cannot stay afloat.

In fact, the 1981-ness of the film feels so tacked onto the story that one wonders why this movie had to be set 35 years ago, or why even the movie has been made in the first place. We can only assume that J.C. Chandor, whose debut film, 2011’s Margin Call, was a first-rate exploration of the 2008 financial meltdown, is convinced that looking into the past will certify him as a great filmmaker. As fantastic as the 1970s were, we need filmmakers who can speak to what’s happening now, who can push movies forward rather than backward. (Chandor did that so well with Margin Call). Learning from cinema of the past is incredibly important, but wallowing in it just feels like cheap imitation, not real art. Margin Call is a compelling, surprisingly complex film, while A Most Violent Year lacks depth.   

As Abel’s wife Anna, Jessica Chastain looks like a homicidal, ferocious Barbie doll. She keeps her nails long and sharp and her breasts featured prominently in her clothes, maintaining a weird mixture of sex-kitten femininity and aggressiveness. It doesn’t always work, chiefly because her character never gets to do much. In an early scene, we see Anna taking charge of a situation: While driving one evening, Abel hits a deer, and Anna insists that he put the deer out of its misery. He extracts a tire iron from the trunk of the car and hesitantly approaches the dying deer (the only heartbreaking moment in the film), and pauses, waiting, hesitating more. Then we hear two shots, and we see Anna holding a gun. That’s when it becomes clear why Chandor included this scene in the first place: Anna will do what’s necessary when Abel will not. Chandor does make use of Anna near the end of the movie when Abel is unable to make his payment on the shipyard. But other than that, her character seems dramatically untapped. She’s a grenade waiting to go off, but she never goes off.

There are more problems. One of Abel’s truck drivers, Julian (Elyes Gabel) is accosted by two thieves and put into the hospital with a broken jaw and some other severe wounds. When he finally gets back on his feet, he’s obviously unhinged, partly because he’s afraid of another robbery and partly because he feels powerless to improve his economic circumstances. When Julian is attacked again, he brandishes a handgun and gets involved in a shootout with the attempted robbers. The police arrive, but Julian runs from the scene like one of the criminals instead of telling the police that he was being attacked. Julian’s emotional breakdown never worked for me because it seemed so illogical for him to run. (Perhaps if Chandor had shown us that the police were corrupt or unwilling to believe his story, Julian’s decision to flee the scene might be more credible.)   

A Most Violent Year isn’t even as violent as you might expect, although it does have a surprising number of jolting moments, as though Chandor were jumping out at us from behind a door and yelling, “Boo!” He does this multiple times, and it’s never clear why we’re meant to be on edge, unless the director mistakenly thinks that this is how you build tension. This film is yet another example of a movie having a variety of excellent parts (strong actors, an interesting subject, good technicians working on it) and amounting to a disappointing result. It may be the only Oscar decision I can really get behind. (Although, I do think people should see this movie. It’s certainly interesting even when it fails to work.)

Broadcast News

Broadcast News (1987) was written and directed by James L. Brooks, one of the creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which may be the greatest sitcom ever made. Brooks returned to the newsroom comedy format with Broadcast News, but with far less success. The characters in this film--there are three main ones, played by Holly Hunter, William Hurt, and Albert Brooks--somehow seem more sitcomish than the characters on Mary Tyler Moore, who were richly developed even in the show's first season, and became even more layered as the show progressed. It's apparent that Brooks, who transitioned into movies after decades of working on the small screen, was unable to create characters who worked on a cinematic level. Instead, each of them is a kind of mishmash of various yuppie traits and psychological problems.

The film opens with short introductions to the main characters as children, showing us the traits necessary for their future careers manifesting themselves even in grade school. Hurt's character, the handsome but intellectually inferior anchorman, struggles even then to compete at an academic level, and complains that he'll never succeed in life because people only like him for his looks. Holly Hunter's character, a Southern girl who's already planted in front of a typewriter, shows her spitfire zeal for telling stories and seeing beneath the surface of communication, and Brooks's character is the typical egghead kid that nobody likes.

So the film establishes these rather obvious characters and then sets them at work in a newsroom together. But it's difficult to believe that William Hurt struggles to keep up intellectually, especially because he comes to Holly Hunter, who's the producer, and complains to her that he doesn't measure up. Somehow, his self-awareness and his ambition to improve make him a less interesting character. He's almost a Ken Doll of banality. If he were Ted Baxter from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the lovable narcissistic buffoon, we'd at least have something to laugh at.

And Albert Brooks, who made a pretty good living in the 80s playing cynical, sarcastic, smart yuppies (see Lost in America), grates on the nerves. His cockiness is a turn-off. He's more obviously arrogant than William Hurt's character, who may hide his arrogance behind a mask of fake-humility. However, he's intellectually honest, and the movie and James L. Brooks want us to prize this above all other qualities. And that's why Holly Hunter's character is so torn between the two men: One of them is handsome and "needs" her to help him be a better thinker, and the other one is smart and goes out of his way to value her as his equal. But these are such cookie-cutter 80s characters, and in so many ways, Broadcast News is such a cookie-cutter 80s movie, that I found myself increasingly less interested in the whole affair.

With Joan Cusack, Jack Nicholson, Robert Prosky, and Lois Chiles.

Lost in America

Lost in America (1985) is about a successful L.A. ad man (played by Albert Brooks, who also directed the film) who quits his job and then buys a motor-home so he and his wife (Julie Hagerty) can travel the country and find themselves. It left me disappointed because I'd heard such good reviews. Within about thirty minutes my mood for the film had gone from hopeful to sour. (It happened at precisely the moment where Hagerty is gambling in the casino, repeating the number "22" over and over again, and Brooks is asking, repeatedly, how much money she's lost.) Perhaps this movie resonates better with people in the shoes of these two characters: they're frustrated yuppies who love the movie Easy Rider but didn't have the courage to go riding into the sunset when they were younger. Now that they've spent the better part of a decade building up a sense of financial security (the concept of the "nest egg" is bandied about often, but never with as much comic force as Brooks seems to think it contains), they're bored and disappointed with the normal life, and feeling a bit left out of the not-so-real idea of people just leaving society and doing their own thing. Hagerty's unexpected gambling splurge becomes a plot device so that Brooks, who wrote the script, can critique the yuppies, not only for their banal materialistic lives, but also for their condescending attitudes about Americans who aren't like them. And while the performances are good and the ideas interesting and clever, Lost in America feels like flat coke: the comedy doesn't really work much of the time, and the charm of Brooks and Hagerty slowly drains out of them as their characters' actions become increasingly irritating. The final twenty minutes picks up a bit--as they soon realize the gravity of their decisions--but not in time to save the movie from feeling a bit inconsequential. It's a smart comedy, and relatively well-plotted if you can forgive that very obvious device, but its ideas are stronger than its laughs. ★★

Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro as a cabbie who's so disgusted with New York City he develops an inflated sense of his own moral superiority to the grimy, sleazy underbelly of the Big Apple. Taxi Driver (1976) is director Martin Scorcese's paean to violence, or something like that. If you trace the radical change in movies that began around the time of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), you can pretty much tell that Taxi Driver is the ne plus ultra of that evolution, sort of a domestic Apocalypse Now (1979), but less inflated.

However, Taxi Driver never tries to be anything it isn't. It's about a man with a deluded one-track mind. He wants to find his niche in the world, but can't. He's got a charming arrogance that only temporarily hides his social ineptitude. When he introduces himself to a political campaign organizer (Cybill Shepard), he's remarkably sure of himself. But then he blows it by taking her to a porno movie, and acts completely shocked, dumbfounded even, when she's appalled and wants to break the date. And you believe that he generally didn't think it through that a dirty movie isn't her idea of a good time. Somehow De Niro makes you believe that.

As garishly unappealing as Taxi Driver can be, it also has a luridly intoxicating flow to it. You feel as if you're floating through the movie right alongside De Niro. His cab is a "vehicle" by which we experience his disgust with a capital D. He can't seem to get his life in order, and the sleaze he sees, which he deliberately ensconces himself in, helps him distance himself from his own problems. Like most serial killers, he would rather blame the world for his shit than get his shit together.

The 1970s ushered in a lot of violent movies, and thus a lot of talk from filmmakers, studio executives, critics, the media, and audience members, about the impact of violence on viewers. The violent scenes in Taxi Driver, as unpleasant as they are, transform the main character into a local hero who rescues the kid prostitute from her swarthy pimp. Is heroic violence that glorifies violence still bad? Is violence bad? It's certainly a reality in the world in which we live.

The script is by Paul Schrader, who showed an even deeper proclivity for sleaze in the George C. Scott drama Hardcore (1979). Jodie Foster co-stars as a very young hooker. Harvey Kietel plays her vile pimp, who shows a true virtuosity at being a complete sleazebag. Albert Brooks plays the nerdy political aide who's hot for Cybill Shepard but unwilling to break the professional veil of xerox machines and political rallies and business meetings.