A Most Violent Year Review: Yet Another Oscar-Bait Candidate

The mostly Oscar bait A Most Violent Year is a largely hollow experience.

Review by Matt Cummings

In Writer-Director J.C. Candor's A Most violent Year, business and morals clash in the world of 1981 New York. Then and there, the city is undergoing one of its most murderous years in history, with ordinary people caught in the crossfire and businessmen seeing their property stolen from underneath them. It's here that small business owner Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) finds himself pining for a brighter future with a world trying desperately to take it all away from him. Married into the heating oil industry which was run by his wife Anna's (Jessica Chastain) father, Abel is trying to expand his business by borrowing the money needs for a massive expansion. But his jealous competition is watching and plotting against him, even as Abel tries to keep his trucks from being stolen by those same rivals. It all comes to a head when his lawyer Andrew (Albert Brooks) informs him of a damaging investigation by the assistant district attorney (David Oyelowo), who claims dirty play in the building of Abel's empire. Faced with a growing wave of pressure, Abel must use every tool at his disposal not only to succeed but to merely survive.

Based on this rather lengthy plot, you might have as much trouble as I did getting excited about it, and that's about the way this drama unfolds. None of it is particularly compelling nor does it feel realistic: in the real world, the kind and empathetic Abel would simply be run through the grinder on his way to financial and personal ruin. Sure, Candor fills Violent with an impressive cast led by Isaac and Chastain, who both are nothing short of forces of nature. When Johanna finds a gun dumped outside their newly-purchased home, she knows this isn't mere coincidence. Her rage slowly builds until not even Abel can keep her from using her old Family ties to bring some balance to their struggle. But none of that - even the verbal throwdowns led by Isaac and Chastain - are enough to keep us awake through what's really a dull affair.

New York's crime wave must have yielded better stories than this, yet Violent's one-man-one-struggle plot is not even that engrossing. The idea of watching someone in such slow-motion crisis doesn't really work, because we know somehow that Abel and Johanna will ultimately get through these challenges. Their lawyer (Albert Brooks) does get in a few good shots about the company's treachery, and there are some decent action scenes when one Abel's employees gets tragically caught up in a shootout for his truck. Good people succeeding in a corrupt universe is usually screen-worthy, but it's Candor the Writer's execution that left me frankly bored. Oyelowo plays stoggy attorney too well, content to sit outside Abel's home or converse with him behind a desk, rather than challenge or help actually root out the cause of these thefts. There's nothing memorable about such a performance, and it's a microcosm of why Violent fails.

Moreover, the story never fully addresses why Abel feels the need to be so well-behaved. Johanna can't figure it out either, and by the time things fade to black, we couldn't care less. Stories like these place the audience in a weird place, because they never make their case to keep us around, choosing moments of empty exposition and hoping that somehow we're still dialed in because it has Oscar Bait written on it. Wrong.

In a year of terrific Oscar candidates, A Most Violent Year will be easily missed, and for good reason. It's a fairly flat affair, one that misuses its enormous potential, and whose longevity will be based entirely on it attaining some sort of cult status. That's not likely.

A Most Violent Year is rated R for language and some violence and has a runtime of of 125 minutes.

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