A Most Violent Year (2014)
Directed by J.C. Chandor
A thriller set in New York City during the winter of 1981, statistically one of the most violent years in the city's history, and centered on the lives of an immigrant and his family trying to expand their business and capitalize on opportunities as the rampant violence, decay, and corruption of the day drag them in and threaten to destroy all they have built.
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47 films that influenced A Most Violent Year
What critics say influenced A Most Violent Year
Here, he hones in on one element of New York City criminal life that, at first glance, seems mundane compared to, say, The Godfather, one of the film’s obvious inspirations.
The parallels to mob movies are strong, enhanced by Isaac's occasional channeling of Al Pacino in "The Godfather" films.
Isaac’s performance is initially distracting, channeling too much of the idealistic, young Michael Corleone in The Godfather (not the soulless, monstrous Michael of The Godfather Part II).
Isaac’s performance brings to mind Al Pacino (both in choices and in appearance) in “The Godfather.”
Reviewers have compared Chandor’s film to prime Sidney Lumet, which is bang-on, and Isaac’s quietly commanding performance to Al Pacino’s Michael in The Godfather , partly because Abel too is a man of integrity who’s nevertheless destined to dive into the moral morass with everyone else (actually, rather than Pacino, there are beguilingly odd overtones of Christopher Walken in Isaac’s generally soft-spoken delivery—“We’re on the same side here” becomes, “We’re on the same side?
Played by Oscar Isaac in a watchful, thoughtfully paced performance that recalls Al Pacino in “The Godfather,” Morales is determined to bring personal pride and his own brand of striver’s politesse to the competitive industry he’s adopted: Even when his drivers are brutally hijacked while making their daily runs, he refuses to allow them to arm themselves.
The American director James Gray also has made this kind of sideways homage, channeling the gangster pictures of Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola and the big city thrillers of Sidney Lumet ("Serpico"), with a more meditative pace.
As we go deeper into it, we're reminded of the films of the late Sidney Lumet, the Big Apple's master spinner of cops 'n' robbers tales (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead).
You would think a film entitled “A Most Violent Year” would bring suspense and action to its intriguing premise, but instead it stubbornly insists on slowing things down to the point that you start thinking about similar films, the Sydney Lumet classic, “Serpico,” for example.
J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year is a most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet ( Serpico , Prince of the City ) and Coppola’s Godfather series.
The beautifully lensed ("Selma" DP Bradford Young), atmospheric period movie calls up such Sidney Lumet classics as "Prince of the City" and "Serpico."
Nearly every review of "A Most Violent Year" has mentioned the influence of Sidney Lumet, who captured this era in the Big Apple in films such as "Prince of the City" and "Serpico."
Writer-director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, All is Lost) offers a film stylistically reminiscent of Sidney Lumet, whose great Prince of the City was released in 1981.
It’s particularly reminiscent of Prince of the City and Q&A, two films he made on either end of the 1980s that dealt with crime and corruption in an increasingly grim Gotham — and films that were made in his uniquely invisible and un-showy style.
J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year is a most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet ( Serpico , Prince of the City ) and Coppola’s Godfather series.
The beautifully lensed ("Selma" DP Bradford Young), atmospheric period movie calls up such Sidney Lumet classics as "Prince of the City" and "Serpico."
It’s more like the ’70s-ish films that came after that era — pictures like Sidney Lumet’s “Prince of the City,” which felt generally gritty and grimy but oozed a cooler, less insistent realism.
Nearly every review of "A Most Violent Year" has mentioned the influence of Sidney Lumet, who captured this era in the Big Apple in films such as "Prince of the City" and "Serpico."
At times, such touchstones are too obvious: Chastain's gangster's daughter unmistakeably evokes Michelle Pfeiffer's moll from Scarface.
But with his fuel trucks being hijacked on a daily basis and the DA’s office interested only in investigating his own misdemeanours, Colombian-born Abel Morales (Isaac, channelling Al Pacino in Godfather III more than Scarface ) is struggling to stay on the right side of the law.
Jessica Chastain, on the other hand, gets to have a little more fun as his abrasive wife, Anna, chewing up the delicious scenery with her Brooklyn accent, vintage Armani wardrobes, and neat bangs borrowed undoubtedly from Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface.
That presence is counter-balanced by an equally astounding performance by Jessica Chastain, who at times looks and sounds like Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface.
Some of the most compelling scenes involve Abel and his wife, Anna, played by Jessica Chastain in vintage Armani and with Michelle Pfeiffer ’s hair from “Scarface.”
That idea is Michelle-Pfeiffer-in-“Scarface” as Lady Macbeth.
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Much like this year’s “The Drop,” Chandor’s character-driven drama owes a lot to the work of Sidney Lumet, although it’s an entirely different 1970s classic (“The French Connection”) that no doubt inspired the excellent chase sequence in the final act, which takes place just as the mounting tension comes to a boil, nearly ruining everything Abel stands for in the process.
A tense freeway shootout and car/foot/rail chase sequence aside (the latter plays like a sombre variation on a theme from The French Connection ), A Most Violent Year keeps its action tinder largely dry, the fireworks generated instead by tense conversations between husbands and wives, lawyers and district attorneys, police and putative thieves.
It invokes “The Godfather Part II” (when Abel protests an attack on the family home) and even “The French Connection” (although this time the chase is on foot).
There’s none of the dynamism present in Joaquin Phoenix’s transformation from a wayward sensualist to an anguished hero cop in the similarly eighties-set We Own the Night, and the foot-chase set-piece lacks the choking terror of the car chase in Gray’s film—the gap between the two is the difference between saluting The French Connection and subsuming it into something distinctive and visionary.
His dark features, his concentration, and his formal speech recall (intentionally, I think) Pacino as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather: Part II.”
That coat, too prominent to be considered just a wardrobe accessory, also serves as a movie echo: Al Pacino wore a similar coat in The Godfather: Part II, a gangster’s costume of respectability.
OK, toss back two already: The Corleones also sold oil — olive oil — and the camel-hair coat Abel wears throughout is a dead ringer for the one Al Pacino wore throughout The Godfather: Part II.
This gripping drama recalls The Long Good Friday - also set in the get-rich-quick years of the early 80s - but unlike Bob Hoskins's brutal gang boss, Morales is an honest, nice guy "taking the path most right".
Imagine a New York version of The Long Good Friday and you’ll have some idea of where the plot is heading.
Gifted with a big, Oscar-bait scene in which Abel methodically explains to a trio of wide-eyed new recruits how to secure new customers—a rewrite of Alec Baldwin’s Glengarry Glen Ross monologue—Isaac finds just the right mix of superciliousness and a true believer’s sincerity— the same combination that buoys his entire performance.
If Chandor’s promising 2011 debut, “Margin Call,” could loosely be described as a Wall Street transposition of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “A Most Violent Year” seems to have been steeped overnight in a solution equal parts Sidney Lumet and Lumet’s consummate latter-day reinterpreter, James Gray.
See James Foley’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Mike Judge’s “Office Space,” or Jason Reitman’s “Up In The Air,” all three very different films but all using the mundane to startling effect.
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Sections of this movie are reminiscent of Gray's "The Yards," which was equal parts " On the Waterfront " and "The Godfather," and his followup, the gangster picture/undercover cop thriller " We Own the Night " (which, like "A Most Violent Year," is fitfully excellent, but sometimes tries too hard to be a K-Tel Greatest '70s Macho Movie Hits album).
The municipal stew is dense and unusually flavorful, of a kinship with James Gray’s The Yards and other films made for the last handful of adults who still go to theaters.
Chandor’s film bears an even stronger likeness, though, to Gray’s little-seen sophomore feature, “The Yards” (2000), which built a similar tale of ambition, free enterprise and moral compromise around an essential Big Apple industry: there, subway parts; here, heating oil.
As we go deeper into it, we're reminded of the films of the late Sidney Lumet, the Big Apple's master spinner of cops 'n' robbers tales (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead).
It’s an apt enough comparison, although Chandor’s style tends to be less teeming and comprehensive than the approach the late Lumet took in movies such as Serpico, Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon and Q & A.
He’s reflecting on the recent past, but behind the camera, in 2014, his director might be daydreaming about Dog Day Afternoon.