I Have Mixed Feelings About A Most Violent Year

Note - this article is a re-publishing of an earlier review to combat techincal difficulties on my site.

On paper, J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year has it all. It's got an excellent and subdued screenplay, wonderful performances from both leads, surprising attention to detail, a strong sense of fundamentals, and awesome camera work and color grading that makes the whole ordeal look really good. This movie should have worked way better than it did for me, and yet I was never able to escape the sense that something crucial was missing. And while I was eventually able to put my finger on what exactly that thing was, this movie puts me in a hard place as a critic. My criticisms of this movie are going to be a little bit more abstract than usual, and yet I want you as the reader to understand where I'm coming from enough not to dismiss my critiques as artsy-fartsy or, worse, as me just looking for a reason to complain about this movie. So you're just going to have to trust me on this one, and I promise, not everything I am going to say about this movie will be negative. The film does do some things very well, and I fully plan on elaborating on its strengths alongside its weaknesses. But where the movie falls short, it surprised me in some unpleasant ways by falling down in this particular area, especially because it's a movie made by A24, a studio that's known for being a lot of things, indistinct not being one of them. And maybe if you watch it, you'll come away having formed a completely different opinion on A Most Violent Year than I did, a more positive one. And if that's the case, power to you, my friend. Critics will often pan a movie for different reasons and conversely praise it for different ones as well, and these disparities can open a helpful dialogue into various aspects of a movie that will cause some to laud it, and others to dismiss it. The term critical consensus will only take you so far, but this is a far cry from the Google audience score, which tends to encourage a mob-rating of everything with a surprising lack of nuance, as if the 5-star review and the 1-star review are the only options that are allowed to people who use the feature. The more popular the movie, the worse this effect gets. In fact, to go on a little bit of a tangent, Eggers's recent Nosferatu is a perfect example of this effect at play if you want to see for yourself what I'm talking about, and if you're one of those people who have a never trust the critics mindset, I hope this case study can help change your mind a little. But back to A Most Violent Year. Why do I bring up the audience score for Nosferatu? Well, I'm trying to make the point to you that the audience score lacks nuance, and that if you come away with a different opinion on A Most Violent Year than I do, that's OK. I'm mostly trying to reckon that, in some ways, I'm going to be departing from a lot of my usual criteria on this site to critique this particular movie, and will likely have a different opinion of it than some other critics, as I noticed and felt something that some of them had missed if this film's 90% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average score of 7.8/10 means anything at all. Just track with me here, and maybe you'll see what I'm talking about if you decide to watch this movie for yourself.

Directed by J.C. Chandor, A Most Violent Year is a fictional film set in 1981 New York City that follows Abel Morales, the owner of a trucking company who is simultaneously dealing with serial hijackings of some of his truckers as well as the tension this situation causes with his wife, Anna.

I said it at the start of this review, but I want to reiterate it because it's true. Whoever did the coloring on this movie is truly talented, and it just makes the already impressive production design and location scouting look that much better. This film is really pretty, and for all of its problems, it doesn't really have many noticeable visual flaws that will take you out of the experience of watching it. The dynamic between Abel and Anna is an impressive one too, but unfortunately for the rest of the family, Abel's daughters only appear very briefly in a couple of scenes and almost feel like an afterthought. I get that there are a lot of rules about how long child actors can be on set, but this movie would have been better off just not introducing the girls in the first place for as little as it utilized them, and I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that this movie just ran into scheduling issues, Department of Labor restrictions, or both. However, even though some of this cast is stunted, I must say that both Oscar Isaac, who portrays Abel, and Jessica Chastain, who portrays Anna, gave wonderful performances. Both of them are well fleshed-out too, and possess small details that probably wouldn't have mattered to other directors, details that make the characters in this movie just that much more believable. What's more, these characters are consistent in the small things. For example, Abel consistently gives one piece of advice to different workers in his company: maintain eye contact. It's a small thing that adds that much more believability and life to Abel.

On the level of plot, this movie doesn't have too many revelations, action sequences, or flair. If you're looking for an exciting watch, this probably isn't it. But what this movie lacks in entertainment value, it gains in strong fundamentals and a meticulous pace. The way it develops its problems is excellent, and these problems just become more and more personal for Abel as the film progresses, which is as it should be. The movie does a lot of things well. So, I found myself asking, what's missing from this picture? I knew that something about A Most Violent Year wasn't sitting well with me, but for a while, I wasn't able to put my finger on what exactly that thing was. And then, all of a sudden, it hit me. The movie may be very technically good, but I found myself wishing that it had more of a soul to call its own. Nothing about the movie really disappointed me, but nothing about it truly captivated me, either. It's good, but it's nothing we haven't seen before. A Most Violent Year lacks an identity to call its own, even if it may be quite well-acted and very good-looking.

For as good as it plays on paper and for as great as its performances may be, what A Most Violent Year needs so desperately is a distinct identity to explore, a soul to call its own. It's content to trace out aspects from other movies, and so the final picture it's drawing is clean, but lacking in vision. This isn't supposed to be Taxi Driver. This isn't supposed to be Zodiac. And I get that the movie's trying to subvert a lot of expectations about a story that happens to be set in 1970s New York City. But it's also trying to live up to other crime dramas. For the most part, it's successful. But it's so content to recite and alter stuff we've already heard that it doesn't really justify its own existence, and still falls under the shadow of other films that came before it. For a film from A24, a company I had been able to count on for originality, I count myself a little let down by the lack of vision on display here. But even if the film might be lacking in soul, it's got strong fundamentals, and so even if I count myself somewhat let down by A Most Violent Year and its surprising derivativeness, in some ways, strong fundamentals are still enough for me.

A Most Violent Year - 7/10

1 Timothy 3:1-4