A Most Vio­lent Year

Sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, 1981 was an espe­cial­ly vio­lent year for the cit­i­zens of New York. Back then, in the ear­ly days of the Rea­gan era, the city was far from the gen­tri­fied metrop­o­lis we know today – homi­cide rates were at an all-time high, with white flight, a spike in unem­ploy­ment brought on by indus­tri­al decline and an equal­ly sharp rise in drug-relat­ed crime all con­tribut­ing to the malaise. Deter­mined to rise above the rot is Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), a self-made busi­ness­man on the verge of acquir­ing a fac­to­ry that would give his oil com­pa­ny an edge over the competition.

As shrewd as he is sin­gle-mind­ed, it seems as if noth­ing is going to stand in Morales’ way. Pret­ty soon, how­ev­er, he falls into a spot of finan­cial and legal both­er, and the foun­da­tions of his empire sud­den­ly don’t appear as sound as before. There’s a more imme­di­ate threat to his oper­a­tion — some­one is hijack­ing his trucks, sell­ing off the stock and leav­ing his dri­vers bat­tered and shak­en. Some­thing has to be done, but Morales would soon­er sit back and try to ride out the storm than go against his bet­ter judge­ment and arm his work­force, poten­tial­ly putting his employ­ees and the pub­lic at greater risk.

With his neat­ly coiffed bouf­fant, knee-length camel hair coat and ele­gant, head­strong wife (Jes­si­ca Chas­tain) and shady right-hand man (Albert Brooks) invari­ably by his side, Morales fits the descrip­tion of an arche­typ­al on-screen crook. But this is not your typ­i­cal big city crime dra­ma. Morales is more Ser­pi­co than Scar­face. His inter­pre­ta­tion of the Amer­i­can Dream is decid­ed­ly straight-laced. He ser­monis­es about tak­ing the path that’s ​“most right”, about doing the hon­ourable thing even when those around you are implor­ing you to take more dras­tic mea­sures. So why does every­thing about him some­how seem disingenuous?

Writer/​director JC Chan­dor pre­vi­ous­ly pro­vid­ed a stark cross-sec­tion of social and eco­nom­ic decay with 2011’s Mar­gin Call, yet his spir­i­tu­al fol­low up lacks the bite and con­vic­tion of its pre­de­ces­sor. The basic premise – what if the chief pro­tag­o­nist in a gang­ster movie was a dyed-in-the-wool paci­fist? – is intrigu­ing enough, but despite Oscar Isaac’s best efforts, Morales man­ages to come across as pho­ny even when protest­ing his inno­cence and declar­ing him­self to be a man of high moral values.

Per­haps the point of A Most Vio­lent Year is not to take things at face val­ue – David Oyelowo’s detec­tive, for instance, is intro­duced as a prin­ci­pled law-and-order man before reveal­ing him­self to be no less flawed than the indi­vid­ual he is pur­su­ing. If that’s the case, how­ev­er, why does Chan­dor appear so com­mit­ted to show­ing us that cap­i­tal­ism and the end­less pur­suit of per­son­al for­tune don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly breed cor­rup­tion; that con­trary to the pop­u­lar idiom, nice guys occa­sion­al­ly fin­ish first? It just doesn’t add up. If the film does even­tu­al­ly arrive at a sin­gle, uni­ver­sal truth, it’s a depress­ing­ly famil­iar one: while the weak per­ish, the strong prosper.