JC Chandor’s ‘A Most Violent Year’

A Most Violent Year is set in 1981 in New York where Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) is an emerging presence in the cutthroat business of distributing heating oil. Just as he is about to close on a real estate deal for a riverside tank facility which would turn him into a major player, his rivals close in. His employees are intimidated, his family are threatened and an ambitious young assistant District Attorney (David Oyelowo) puts him under investigation. Abel’s wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain), keeps the business’s books in the less than rigorous fashion of the time and sector and, coming from a mafia family, has her own views on how to handle the situation. Abel sets out to do better than that, believing that a man “must take the path that is most right” and being totally confident in his ability to do so and in his own powers of leadership. The film is the story of how, rather against the odds, he succeeds and is revealed to be cut out to be much more than a dealer in kerosene. I would be surprised if Chandor doesn’t return before long to the story of Abel Morales .

Abel’s fastidiousness and ambition gives Isaac a chance to reveal his considerable dramatic range, quite a different characterisation from those of Rydal in The Two Faces of January and (Inside) Llewyn Davis. Chastain, notable in Zero Dark Thirty, has a couple of good scenes but the film is primarily about Anna’s husband.

Chandor’s first feature, Margin Call, which he also wrote and directed, was primarily about investment banking at the time of the crash, Wall Street and New York providing the background. This film, his third, is down on the streets and audiences outside the US may not always appreciate the nuances of a scenario firmly embedded in a particular American city (even if they realise that in the US a DA has to run for office). By far the most helpful and informative review of A Most Violent Year which I have read was, perhaps not surprisingly, that in the New Yorker by their David Denby who has been a film reviewer in New York since the 1970s.

Chandor has now started on Deepwater Horizon, a story about the offshore drilling rig disaster in 2010 which had such dire consequences for the UK oil major, BP. It will be interesting to see what line he takes and consequently what British critics decide to make of it.

Hossein Amini’s ‘The Two Faces of January’

The novelist Patricia Highsmith is probably best remembered for her five stories published between 1955 and 1991 concerning the felonies and misdemeanours of Tom Ripley. A cultivated but utterly ruthless man, he murders without hesitation for money and self-preservation. Originally American, but thoroughly Europeanised, he lives not far from Paris with his French heiress wife in their home, Belle Ombre, - which translates into English as Beautiful Shadow, the apt main title of Andrew Wilson’s Life of Patricia Highsmith, published in 2010.

The two male main characters in Amini’s The Two Faces of January, which he has based on one of Highsmith’s other novels originally published in 1964, certainly display Ripleyish tendencies. Chester MacFarland (Viggo Mortensen), a New Yorker, is on holiday in Greece with his young wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst). They strike up a friendship with tour guide Rydal (Oscar Isaac), an American student. Events turn this relationship into a disastrous conspiracy, not eased by Rydal’s interest in Colette. Isaac portrays Rydal as being a more intelligent and less flawed character than his Llewyn Davis, by the way.

Amini’s adaptation and direction carefully retained Highsmith's setting of Greece in 1962. The locations and costumes, and the deployment of lorry-loads of props and bus-loads of extras, make the film attractive to watch and Amini justly praises his “brilliant production crew” in Crete. Taken as a whole though, some people may feel it lacks pace but fails by way of compensation to provide much depth of psychological insight.

Joel & Ethan Coen’s ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

Maybe it was the 1960s setting, maybe it was the folk music, but as I watched Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis the words of a rugby song I last heard years ago as a student came into my mind: “Why was he born so beautiful, Why was he born at all? …” (which then descends into something else). Was it the Davis character? The film is a circular account of a few days in the life of a folk singer in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1962. Llewyn is a ne’er-do-well – “… everything you touch turns to shit, you're like king Midas's idiot brother”, he is told, understandably, at one point, by Jean (Carey Mulligan), who may be pregnant by him rather than by her partner and Llewyn's friend, Jim.  But the artistic world is full of people like Llewyn who want in, and the separation of an individual’s success and failure seems to be a matter of luck as much as talent.

Perhaps it was not the main character but the feeling that so much film-making skill had been directed at so slight a product. The 1960s New York settings were very convincing (the subway a real work of art) as was Llewyn’s road trip to Chicago and back. Similarly all the casting was excellent with heavyweight, if brief, contributions from John Goodman and F Murray Abraham, as well as Isaac’s flawless portrayal of a flawed young man, artfully contrasted with Stark Sands’ Troy, a soldier with a promising career as a singer. It could be that I just don’t like folk music that much (a soft spot for Joan Baez apart), but having said that, the Please Mr Kennedy session is a joy.

If you find this review shallow, then read Francine Prose’s for Prospect Magazine:

Llewyn’s passion for that music, and his inability to create, for himself, a career—or a life—remind us of a current that runs through many of the Coen brothers’ films: you can have talent, promise, a moderate amount of decency and luck, and things might still not work out. This may be the least American aspect of the Coen’s work, the least characteristic of a culture that (openly and privately) believes that hard work and good intentions will pay off, and of a country in which, to quote Julian Barnes, “emotional optimism is a constitutional duty.”

It will also take you to Please Mr Kennedy on YouTube.