A Most Violent Year

Abel, the harried protagonist of J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year (2014) is impeccable in all ways.  As played by Oscar Isaac, Abel (the name is pronounced with a strong accent on the last syllable) is simply too handsome to be believed.  Isaac has dark good looks that are so spectacular as to threaten the film's otherwise realistic texture:  this guy looks too good to be true.  And, in fact, Abel is a sort of fairy-tale hero -- he is unfailingly polite and humble, always thanking people for agreeing to see him; he has a beautiful wife whose cleavage he is not averse to treating as a business asset.  His children are cute and clever and he's bold and virtuous -- in the film's last scene, he tells a soon-to-be-corrupt city official that he has always chosen "the most right" path to achieving his objectives.  There may be a little quibble as to whether his objectives are worthy -- he's trying to acquire a river terminal and storage tanks for his growing fuel gas empire (his fleets of trucks deliver fuel on Manhattan and throughout all of the boroughs and northern New Jersey).  For Abel, everything is transactional and he displays the most punctilious honor in repaying debts and protecting his workers.  His problem, however, is that his ambition has landed him in trouble:  he is expanding his base of operations into territory long held by competitors and they are responding by hijacking his trucks, stealing his fuel oil, and beating up his employees.  Abel's response to this harassment is to make complaints to the District Attorney, apparently in Newark.  This strategy is ineffective -- the DA's office is investigating Abel's operation, probably at the behest of one or more of his competitors and a 14 count indictment against him is under preparation.  Against this sea of troubles, Abel stubbornly refuses to use certain tools that are available to him.  His wife is the daughter of a Brooklyn gangster and, of course, she offers her father's assistance, something that Abel rejects with horror.  The Teamsters representative suggests that Abel arm his drivers.  This he also rejects on the basis that the truckers don't have valid conceal and carry licenses.  When a shoot-out occurs on a bridge leading into Manhattan (one of Abel's drivers has taken matters into his own hands and armed himself), the Abel's bank withdraws financing.  This creates a dilemma for Abel who has staked his entire fortune on acquiring the river terminal from a group of Hasidic Jews.  The film's narrative consists of Abel's efforts to find out who is harassing his business while simultaneously working feverishly to put funding in place for the terminal deal after his bank withdraws support. 

Chandor is a scrupulously realistic director best-known for the Robert Redford vehicle, All is Lost as well as Margin Call.  These films rely upon precise exposition of a milieu that may be unfamiliar to most viewers.  Abel is from some Spanish-speaking place, possibly Puerto Rico, but his English is precise and impeccable (like everything about him) and he makes even his Latino workers speak English when they are on the job.  Abel represents an immigrant outsider who has played by the rules, amassed a considerable fortune through his law-abiding efforts, and, then, finds himself confronting the lawlessness of mobbed-up American business.  Chandor shows that there is little distinction between gangsters and businessmen, a perennial and unfair trope in films of this sort.  The menacing figure that Abel confronts at his barber shop is not a mobster but the owner of a competitor fuel gas company.  When Abel enters an Italian restaurant to find a group of men gathered around a table in the back of the deserted joint, we learn that these men are not the Mafia but, instead, the owners of competing fuel gas companies meeting to "carve-up" and manage the market.  Although we see shady characters from time-to-time, the chances are that they are simply other players in the fuel gas business. 

This is the kind of film in which the script is probably better than the way the movie plays.  It's a neo-noir, filmed in color, but a picture that would be perfectly comfortable in grim-looking black-and-white.  The acting is uniformly splendid and the best thing about the picture is its characters -- just about everyone is believable, with an interesting, even gripping, back-story.  Character is developed through action and there is very little explanatory discourse -- this makes the picture interesting:  we are always speculating about motives.  Jessica Chastain dares to make herself look more than a little hard-bitten as Abel's wife -- she's a tough cookie, more than willing to protect herself with her little pearl-handled gun and by other extra-legal means as well.  (Abel snarls at her that the gun -- he abhors all firearms -- is the sort of weapon that a "whore would carry.")  Albert Brooks playing Abel's weary and mildly corrupt consiglieri excels in that part.  The various thugs and goons are all colorfully portrayed and there's a discordant, if powerful, subplot about a young man, also an immigrant, who hopelessly aspires to the wealth and influence of his boss, Abel.  Every shot has a purpose -- scenes of Abel working-out by running at high-speed along the docks are not only picturesque but establish the middle-aged hero's ability to engage in long-distance footraces with the goons harassing him.  (But the showy scene involving the foot-race through decaying warehouses, onto a subway, ending in a big beat-down on a subway platform is completely superfluous -- why not the just stage the beat-down at the place where the highjackers have wrecked Abel's fuel truck? From a strictly narrative point of view, all of the running is unnecessary and looks absurd anyway; Abel's camel hair coat, which is a like a character in the movie, doesn't get besmirched in the grimy chase and Abel himself seems scarecely out of breath.)  Similarly, at one point, Abel's wife questions an additional $11,000 payment on the fuel terminal transaction.  Abel tells her that one of the tanks still has fuel oil in it and that he is paying a commercially reasonable price for the oil.  The oil is necessary for a later sequence in which someone commits suicide and, inadvertently, shoots a hole in the tank.   The tank begins to leak and Abel plugs the leak with his handkerchief.  This is an example of the film's script seeking to embody it's meanings in an emblematic image:   Abel is always "plugging leaks" but it seems to me that the pressure of impounded oil in a 50,000 gallon tank could not be stanched in the event of leak by merely putting the tip of a handkerchief in the bullet-hole -- of course, this raises speculation as to the volume of oil in the tank, that is, how high is the level of the oil.  (My point is that be creating these visually effective metaphors,  Chandor gets himself into narrative trouble that he, then, has to correct in other parts of his hyper-ingenious script; this can be a wee bit distracting.) There are three-fourths of a good movie here, but, in the end, I'm not exactly convinced.  If Abel is such a straight-arrow, how come he is transacting business with a group of Hasidic Jews in brief cases full of raw money -- I assume that taxes are being avoided here.  But isn't this illegal?  In one scene, a search warrant is executed on Abel's home.  While his wife uses her wiles to delay the cops, Abel takes boxes of accounting records out of the back of house and puts them under a cantilevered balcony.  Are the cops really so inept that they are not going to look under the balcony behind the house?  The last part of the film involving Abel's scramble to raise more money seems contrived to me.  Why doesn't he mortgage his home?  It's a mansion that seems worth about a million dollars.  Can't he float a loan with the fuel oil providers or distributors?  Would the bank really pull the plug on finance to his business because of some bad publicity?  Banks are some of the most criminal enterprises in the country and it would seem that the mildly illegality in which Abel is involved wouldn't deter most banks from doing business with him.  Ultimately, I suppose, the film can be seen as neo-realist -- a high-finance version of Bicycle Thieves with the funding for the river terminal standing in for the bike.  The problem for the movie is that if you posit realism as the measure of your film, it had better be realistic on all levels and in all details -- and here I think the film comes up a little short.  Chandor's theme, I suppose, is that even the most virtuous are corrupted by American business practices.  Abel's wife says that her accounting is "consistent with the standards of the business" -- whatever this means.  And, in fact, corruption inside his own organization, very close to home, ultimately saves the day for Abel.  This is the meaning of Abel's assertion that he has always chosen "the most right" way -- not the right way, but the "most right".