A Most Violent Year

Movies to See Right Now

by
David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. (center back) in SELMA
David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. (center back) in SELMA

The best films in theaters right now are no secret – most are Oscar-nominated:

  • Clint Eastwood’s thoughtful and compelling American Sniper, with harrowing action and a career-best performance from Bradley Cooper.
  • The inspiring Selma, well-crafted and gripping throughout (but with an unfortunate historical depiction of LBJ).
  • The Belgian drama Two Days, One Night with Marion Cotillard, which explores the limits of emotional endurance.
  • The cinematically important and very funny Birdman. You can still find Birdman, but you may have to look around a bit. It has justifiably garnered several Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture.
  • Reese Witherspoon is superb in the Fight Your Demons drama Wild, and Laura Dern may be even better.
  • The Theory of Everything is a successful, audience-friendly biopic of both Mr. AND Mrs. Genius.
  • The Imitation Game – the riveting true story about the guy who invented the computer and defeated the Nazis and was then hounded for his homosexuality.
  • I was underwhelmed by the brooding drama A Most Violent Year – well-acted and a superb sense of time and place (NYC in 1981) but not gripping enough to thrill.

My DVD/Stream of the week is last year’s best Hollywood movie, the psychological thriller Gone Girl, with a star-making performance by Rosamund Pike. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.

It’s time for Turner Classic Movies’ annual 31 Days of Oscar – a glorious month of Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning films on TCM. This week, I am highlighting:

  • The Great Dictator (February 7): Charlie Chaplin’s hilarious and devastating takedown of a thinly disguised Adolph Hitler – almost two years before the US entered WW II.
  • Laura (February 9): perhaps my favorite thriller from the noir era, with an unforgettable performance by Clifton Webb as a megalomaniac with one vulnerability – the dazzling beauty of Gene Tierney. The musical theme is unforgettable, too.
  • All the King’s Men (February 11): one of the best political movies of all time, from the novel based on the saga of Huey Long . Watch for the brilliant, Oscar-winning supporting performance by Mercedes McCambridge.
  • The Bad Seed (February 13): very bad things are happening – the chill comes from the revelation that the murderous fiend is a child with blonde pigtails.

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

by
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?]