A Most Violent Year

The title "A Most Violent Year" is something of a misnomer. Yes, the film is set in 1981, New York City's most statistically violent until that time, but violence on screen is kept by writer/director J.C. Candor to a strict minimum. Rather it is about violence gathering like low-hanging clouds just off the side of every frame and gradually infecting the existence of Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac). He is a wonder of polite fastidiousness, a man who dresses not to kill but to impress, desperate to continually convey a cultured disposition, speaking with emphasis on the civilized nature of his voice. After all, he's merely a business man, or so he would have you believe. "You must take the path that is most right," he lectures, and you can tell he believes it. He really believes it.

He runs an oil delivery business with his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), and with their lawyer, Walsh (Albert Brooks), as consigliere. They are doing fine, making more than enough to purchase a suburban home as citadel, dressing with panache, asking for the wine list at dinner. But if "A Most Violent Year" revolves around that age-old marketing pitch of The American Dream, well, it's a commercialized ethos that goes hand-in-hand with avarice. Abel is not content to run a successful enterprise - no, he wants to be top dog, but being top dog means more problems. He takes out a massive loan on a piece of property along the East River intended to expand his fiefdom that must be paid back in thirty days. Bad dudes are hijacking his company trucks. The local D.A. is digging around in his past.

In so many ways there is nothing new about "A Most Violent Year." It's got the crime film playbook and runs it, step by step, right down to the hoary sequence where the law comes calling for Abel at his kid's birthday party. Hell, it’s even got a car chase. Yet that car chase, shown from Abel's point-of-view, feels different, like a refined man with a driver suddenly finding himself driving in a scene straight out of "The French Connection." It's like Abel has wound up in a yellowy seventies crime film, one of the ones he's probably seen and of which he's likely said, "It's just a movie. That has no basis in reality. Can't happen to me." But it has. And Chandor invests such low-pitched fervor into every detail, every foregone twist, every overcast frame, that the same old-same old still comes across stacked with slow-burning significance. The deer who helpfully blunders in front of Abel and Anna's so it can be put out of its misery is an absurdly convenient illustration of his distaste for violence and her lingering thirst for it, yes, but the manner in which she takes the gun her hubby didn't know she had and puts that mammal down is spine-tingling.

In fact, there is more than a little of "The Master" dynamic here as we come to view Abel as the face of the franchise and Anna as its tough-minded brains, the gangster's daughter, the one cooking the books and smoking the cigarettes and talking tough. When their trucks are being stolen, he yearns to resist arming their drivers while she whole-heartedly endorses it. At times, you almost wish Chastain might hijack the movie in the manner of those vehicles, but the story Chandor wants to tell is of a man who has come to believe so heartily in his own high-class persona that he seems virtually incapable of acknowledging the mud in which he's stepped. "This is what it's come to?" he asks his lawyer upon being told they should confer outdoors. "We have to walk around outside like we're mobsters?" Abel doesn't get it but Walsh does. It's that kind of film, one where the lawyer isn't so much the main character's conscious as the pragmatic truth-teller.

In his previous films, the solid "Margin Call" and the superb "All Is Lost", Chandor told exceptionally tight stories of cataclysmic events impressing themselves upon their male protagonists. "A Most Violent Year" follows an identical blueprint but its plentiful atmosphere elicits less urgency than melancholy, like an elegy appropriate to a funeral home. This is about a man straining for upward mobilization only to find himself in a downward spiral, regressing to the mean of every criminal enterprise where shots are fired and people die and you learn that rules aren’t made to be broken, per se, but must be broken simply to stay ahead and stay alive.

"The result is never a question for me. Just the path that you take to get there. You must take the path that is most right." And by the end, whether he knows it or not, Abel has come to learn that sometimes, to maintain a kingdom, the path that is most right, is actually most wrong.

The Hierarchy Of Cinematic Female Ass Kickers

My friend Brad, movie buff extraordinaire, recently left a comment on the Facebook that went like this: "Listen 'Fast & Furious' franchise, I've learned to suspend my disbelief with your various vehicular stunts and lax grasp of physics. I will not, however, believe for one second that Michelle Rodriguez, tough though she may be, could ever hold her own (let alone win) against Gina Carano in hand-to-hand combat. That is simply asking too much."

I have, of course, not seen the movie in question, and will not see the movie in question, but, nevertheless, this, as it must, got me to thinking. Could Michelle Rodriguez really defeat Gina Carano in hand-to-hand combat? After all, Carano is a former mixed martial artist, once ranked as high as third in the world at her weight class.

Well, no. She couldn't. Not in real life, anyway, but what we're discussing here is movie life. And that's different. And while Brad is very much talking about movie life, not real life, I submit that in movie life Michelle Rodriguez could win in hand-to-hand combat against Gina Carano.

I submit this because winning in hand-to-hand combat in movie life goes beyond the physical specs. Winning in hand-to-hand combat in movie life is based not simply on billing but on je'ne sai quoi, and, most crucially, The Humphrey Bogart Factor.

The Humphrey Bogart Factor stipulates that a small, short man with lifts in his shoes and a toupee is the greatest badass the movies have ever known. Thus, Michelle Rodriguez could win in hand-to-hand combat against Gina Carano.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: where does Michelle Rodriguez rank in The Hierarchy Of Cinematic Female Ass Kickers?

The Hierarchy Of Cinematic Female Ass Kickers

The Jessica Chastain Level (level one). 

The back room brawler. Smoking cigars, calling shots, reciting terse monologues, taking names on legal pads, remotely kicking ass.

The Jennifer Garner Level (level two). 

The nicey-nice ass-kicker. She's in the field, but she also needs her ass-kicking to be morally justified. Revenge is questionable, consummate badassery is on a case-by-case basis.

The Michelle Rodriguez Level (level three). 

The bar room brawler. Sucker punching. Trash talking. Whiskey bottle over head breaking. Probably doesn't like you (but that's mostly because she doesn't like anyone). Could easily handle the nicey-nice ass-kicker because, you know, she'd cheat.

The Kate Beckinsale Level (level four). 

The elegant levitating ass kicker. Kicks ass elegantly but efficiently - always efficiently. Looks out of her weight class but makes up for it with agility and Beckinsality (defined as: capable of appearing to sport chic fangs when no fangs are actually present). Can also levitate.

The Angelina Jolie Level (level five). 

The pre-eminent ass kicker. The last resort. The entire national defense system in a single person. The red telephone. Call if hostile aliens invade or if a nuclear warhead needs to be caught in mid-air, chewed up and spit out. She could end all action movies in the first 10 minutes but chooses not to for her own entertainment as much as yours.

Countdown to the Oscars: Maya, My Favorite 2012 Movie Character

Since the proper release of "Zero Dark Thirty" it seems that the criticism has thankfully shifted from the political arena (torture) to the cinematic arena, even if I personally think both arguments ring hollow. The dissatisfaction I have encountered regarding Kathryn Bigelow's rightful Oscar nominee for Best Picture involves the characterization of the main character, Maya. The oft-asked question: why do we care about her and/or why are we rooting for her?

Writing about the film in The New Yorker, Richard Brody, in a typically spectacular article (whether you agree or not) chock-full of talking points, boils it down to "deceptive emptiness." I think he gets one of those two words right. "Emptiness." He writes: "(T)here’s also no...personal context for the protagonist. Did Maya not have sex for ten years? Did she have no family with whom she communicates, no friends with whom she discusses her work, her obsession with catching bin Laden, her ideas about life in general? What did she put on hold in her pursuit for bin Laden?"

In my review I noted that "Throughout the film we never see Maya off location. She is always at the job, tucked away at some computer with some stack of files, questioning some detainee. She counts off the days since the compound’s discovery with no action by scribbling the number with a magic marker on her boss’s office window. So often 'possessed' characters in movies are given requisite home front scenes in which they are glimpsed ignoring spouses and forgetting children’s birthdays. Maya does not even have THAT."

The esteemed Roger Ebert has often lamented characters saddled with needless "context", writing, for example, of The Sports Movie Spouse, "This role, complete with the obligatory shots of the wife appearing in his study door as the husband burns the midnight oil, is so standard, so ritualistic, so boring, that I propose all future movies about workaholics just make them bachelors, to spare us the dead air." "Zero Dark Thirty" spares us the dead air!!!

Then again, movies typically have their reasons, however poorly executed, for showing the dead air. Sports Movies, for example, are always on a crusade to remind us that "it's just a game" - hence, the Suffering Spouse. She/He works to remind us (hammer home) that "it's just a game", symbolizing what the protagonist stands to lose by investing him/herself too deeply in the game.

By deliberately refraining from showing us the dead air, Bigelow lets us see how Maya stands to lose nothing personal as a result of her jihad against bin Laden. A colleague (Jennifer Ehle) offers a couple questions about a love life and Maya sluffs them off. A colleague offers to buy her dinner and Maya turns it down. In one blink-and-you-might-miss-it moment she returns to her makeshift residence dressed in traditional Islamic garb, turns on the TV and pops open a tall boy. This, we assume, must be her typical night. Clearly, she has a void. We know this because we never see her engaging in anything personal. She fills the void with the mission. Which is why when her boss threatens to shut the mission down she would rather blackmail him than face life without it. Her emptiness is not deceptive, it is refreshingly candid.

The movie ends, crucially, not with the infamous invasion of bin Laden's compound and his killing, but with Maya, all alone, on a military plane bound for a destination specifically not specified. "Where are we going?" the pilot asks her, and these are the film's final words. She has no idea where she's going. The concluding image is a close-up of Maya, a tear rolling down one cheek, and then another tear rolling down the other. Some have debated the intent behind these tears. To me, it is clear.

It is not until she is alone and forced to consider life without the pursuit just ended that she cries. The void is no longer filled. She has no Suffering Spouse to return to, no semblance of a life away from an interrogation room and military base and we understand this because the movie has consciously refrained from filling in those blanks. She has nothing, not a goddamn thing. So, where to? What now? She has no earthly idea.

I have said before that I adore films bold enough to wait until the final shot to reveal themselves in full, and this is precisely "Zero Dark Thirty's" ultimate intent. Oh, it could be argued that the tears she sheds are our tears too, that the symbolic weight on her shoulders was weight we all carried and that her realization of the hollowness of the ten year ordeal made foolish this need for closure that will never be had in the war on terror. But a character, first and foremost and above all else, is just that - a character, a person, one person and only one. And Maya's final moments are hers alone. The last shot reveals the film to be neither a bin Laden nor a 9/11 film. Instead, it is a Jessica Chastain film - or, more to the point, a Maya film.

Emptiness has never looked more soulful.

Zero Dark Thirty

“What else have you worked on besides bin Laden?”

“Nothing. I’ve worked on nothing else.” 

The first time we truly get a good look at Maya (Jessica Chastain) is in an interrogation room where an al-Queda operative named Anmar (Reda Kateb) is strung up and sadistically water boarded by burly C.I.A. officer Dan (Jason Clarke). But many of these shots are struck in a wide frame so that we can see Maya to the left, standing on the sides of her feet, arms crossed in such a way to suggest she is trying to huddle with herself, generally evoking someone out of her element, fearful and leery of the tactics on display. When we return to the same room and same prisoner later there is a brief moment when Maya is left alone with the prisoner. He senses, as we sense, her wariness. He pleads for help. She replies: “You can help yourself by being truthful.” Woah. She is not quite who we thought she was.

"Zero Dark Thirty", a joint effort by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter (war corespondent) Mark Boal, is a re-telling of America’s attempt in the wake of September 11th to find and kill the man responsible, al-Queda king Osama bin Laden. It stretches across years, chock full of names and dates and places, stops, starts and dead ends. The real deed took, as acting director of the C.I.A. Michael Morell has noted, “the selfless commitment of hundreds of officers.” Bigelow and Boal, however, choose, correctly, to make Maya our one surrogate, our entry point, a character that does not necessarily come manufactured as imposingly heroic and slogan-barking but frightened, suspicious and, ultimately obsessive. 

The much-debated torture scenes in the film are explicit and treading murky, inflammatory ground. It is not outright propaganda but nor does it deny, and in one sequence we watch characters watching President Obama on "60 Minutes" claiming torture was not used in locating bin Laden. The most significant bit here is the characters’ reaction – that is, they have none, as if it is business as usual, as if the President is merely reciting the company line. That is a fairly strong statement. And if this is a political film, and that can certainly be argued, well, this is the film drawing a line in the sand and taking a side, and what are politics if they are not drawing lines in the sand and taking sides?

Does it argue that torture was instrumental in the capture and killing? It does, yes, in that the most crucial clue is revealed by Anmar. And though he reveals it in a moment of water boarding reprieve, of being afforded food and water, it is quite clear that torture laid the groundwork for this revelation. At the same time, the clue is specifically called “a needle in a haystack”, underscoring the notion that clues – strong or weak – were gathered from an assortment of places and that wherever they came from, however they were obtained, it was going to take a person or people to latch onto one and have the faith (compulsion) to see it through.

The clue is a name. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. A false name, as it turns out, but a false name that could lead to a real name. He becomes, in a sense, the Sean Regan of "Zero Dark Thirty", the (mostly) unseen focus of attention, the piece of intel to which Maya clings with fervor, the name she will track to the ends of the earth, convinced to her core that whoever he is will unlock the gate, figurative or otherwise, to bin Laden’s hiding place.

When a few of her colleagues are killed in the tragic attack at Camp Chapman in 2009 she tells another character: “I’ve lost a lot of my friends. I believe I was spared to finish the job.” We know bin Laden will be found and killed, of course, and he is in an elongated sequence that in spite of our awareness of its conclusion will still you breathless. Yet, in a strange way, if the film has a storytelling flaw it is that for this chunk of running time, Maya, to whom and to whose quest we have become so attached, is effectively sidelined. 

More telling is the build-up to the “jackpot”, the way in which the infamous walled-off compound at Abbottabad is discovered and how colleagues, be it C.I.A. or Presidential advisers, waffle in their desire to move on the location without definitive knowledge that the desired target is inside. Maya is definite. She knows. SHE.KNOWS. Everyone goes around an obligatory conference table reciting in percentages their confidence level. They are moderate to less than confident. Then Maya declares: ”One hundred percent.” She quickly amends it to “ninety-five percent. Because I know how people feel about certainty in here.”

Throughout the film we never see Maya off location. She is always at the job, tucked away at some computer with some stack of files, questioning some detainee. She counts off the days since the compound’s discovery with no action by scribbling the number with a magic marker on her boss’s office window. So often “possessed” characters in movies are given requisite home front scenes in which they are glimpsed ignoring spouses and forgetting children’s birthdays. Maya does not even have THAT. A female colleague wonders if she has at least hooked up with another guy on base. Ha! Maya taking time away from the job to hook up? Please! 

Bin Laden and his operatives, for all the atrocious harm they committed across the globe, had an unshakable, if misguided, belief in what they were doing. They were zealots. So is Maya. It takes one to catch one. And in the last stunning shot a single tear is shed. You could read this as relief. Re-consider it, and then consider what Maya is going to do whenever she gets where she is going. “Nothing. I’ve worked on nothing else.”

Often great movies do not reveal themselves in full until the final second and that is "Zero Dark Thirty’s" intention all along – it belongs to Jessica Chastain, and in that instant she cracks the entire movie wide open.