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 Two Faces Of January

If nothing else, "Two Face Of January" is an exemplary Greek travelogue, opening at the beatific ruins of the Acropolis and exploring Athens before crossing the blue water of the Mediterranean for Crete where it meanders up the coastline. Even a scene that finds our desperate trio forced to sleep outdoors on stone benches seems like a warmer night's sleep than the warmth of our own beds. That warmth purposely stands in stark contrast to the characters operating within it. They are con-men, well-heeled and completely cool, but also motivationally suspect and inherently unlikable.

Rydal (Oscar Isaac) is an American tour guide in Athens in 1962. His occupation, of course, is a convenient conduit to pontifications on ancient gods to draw parallels to his forthcoming plight, but it's also believable in that it provides the perfect platform to bilk comely female tourists of their drachma. He has just lost his father but actively chosen to avoid the funeral, and when he sees an American, Chester McFarland (Viggo Mortensen), who inexplicably resembles his old man, it provides an excuse to be drawn into an inevitably nefarious orbit.

Indeed, the manner in which Chester and his trophy wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) reconnoiter Rydal before invoking his accord betrays their status as no mere couple on a honeymoon. He is a swindler, big-time, having defrauded massively moneyed peoples back in the States. And when a P.I. tracks them down, things happen, the P.I. winds up dead and Rydal comes to their aid, helping them to hide out while they wait for fake passports.

While the film has bothersome elements archetypal to the thriller – walking into a hallway at EXACTLY the wrong moment to see the guy propping up a dead body, news reports telling a character EXACTLY what he needs to know – "Two Face Of January", which is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, is more interested in the psychological than the pulse-pounding. In a deft performance, Mortensen opens with the air of a card shark setting you up for the big steal only to slowly morph into a rich man as basket case, and his crack up becomes the film’s focus as opposed to any gotcha! twist.

The film is set in 1962 but it might as well be 2008 with Chester in a Bear Stearns windbreaker rather than a swag tweed suit, refusing penance and attempting to avoid punishment. He’s not a man running from his past, he’s running from his present. He’s running from who he is, and not getting far, no matter how remote the locales. He, however, seems less equipped to deal with his self-made fate than Colette. Her character may be problematically reduced to an object metaphorically dueled over by the two males, as well as a narrative excuse for Rydal to stay in their company even when their secrets are exposed, but Dunst wrings quiet humanity out of willful acceptance. She’s not so much standing by her man as standing with him, aware of the choice she’s made and the consequences that come with it, a captain who understands she must go down with the ship because her mistakes led directly to the sinking.

The wild card is Rydal. Although the idea of Chester being a non-traditional father figure to him is only sporadic, it still feels overdone, not rising organically from the narrative but dropped in with a heavy hand, desperate to trigger his catharsis. Simultaneously, it is canceled out by the implied notion that he is also attracted to Colette. In the end, he simply seems attracted to the high life. There is no confidence trick in "The Two Faces Of January", only beautiful people in beautiful clothes in beautiful places. Who among us can resist?

Inside Llewyn Davis

Robert Frost did not hone in his craft at the Gaslight Lounge in Greenwich Village in the early 60’s but, nevertheless, his words kept returning to me in the wake of The Coen Brothers’ latest stylized opus. “Two roads diverge in a yellow wood.” It’s no secret that the Brothers Coen often function less as impartial observers than puppet masters, choosing a protagonist and then putting him/her through their own brilliantly storyboarded version of cinematic Wipeout! Even their sunnier characters are made to face the gauntlet – Marge Gunderson’s relentless optimism is tested, The Dude’s strikes and gutters philosophy is questioned – but I’m not entirely certain they have ever crafted a character whose fate seems determined so much by himself.

Over and over two roads diverge in a metaphorical yellow wood and the title character, Llwellyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a failing, fading folk musician, a chronic couch surfer, in the dead of winter with no winter coat, is made to choose which road to take. Yes, yes, you could argue that Joel and Ethan Coen are crafting the interlocking freeway system that keeps leading Llewyn to these varying forks, but I could counter that as writers they do a keen job creating a character whose prior life before the film’s kickoff clearly would have led him to this specific point. His choices have resulted in the need to make these decisions. And while Llewyn is another character – there have been several at the movies this year – resistant to easy empathy, Isaac still imbues him with a sort of humanity, albeit a standoffish, self-destructive humanity.

And anyway, Llewyn is an artist. Trust the art, not the artist, right? Then again, I’m not entirely sure Llewyn trusts his own art, let alone himself. Several times, including the requisite story bookends, the movie looks on as he simply sits down and strums his guitar and sings. It’s clear he possesses talent, even if it might not be otherworldly (like the croaker with the poofy hair going by the name Dylan who shows up in silhouette near movie’s end), but a particular scene in which he lashes out and demeans his folk singing as a mere “job” changes our perspective. These are not joyful tunes in sync with the harmony of life nor defiant odes to life’s banality nor material that seems interested in sparking change or leading protest, these are grief-stricken yodels of defeat. We are not watching a star being born, we are watching a star that never quite was crushed by the weight of gravity.

One of the film’s most striking scenes involves Llewyn’s spur of the moment audition for a gruff record producer (F. Murray Abraham, perfect in a single scene cameo). In a different film this might have gone in another direction, but Abraham is both blunt and courteous. He actually presents Llewyn with an opportunity, though it’s an opportunity of compromise and so Llewyn declines. Why exactly? Hubris? Artistic integrity? Some mixture of the two? I can’t say I know for certain, I can’t say for certain that Llewyn knows either. Like Alvy Singer ripping up the ticket right in front of the traffic cop, Llewyn just can’t help himself. Any semblance of sun peeking through clouds is ignored until it recedes.

There is virtually no sunshine in the film. It forgoes the black and white of Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” and, yet, the visual palette of “Inside Llewyn Davis” somehow feels even more cruel. All the color has been drained from Davis’s face, eliciting a vibe of the walking dead as he trudges from place to place in the desperate hope that someone will put him up for the night. The person he calls on more than any other is Jean (Carey Mulligan), his former flame who is now dating a different chirpy folk singer (Justin Timberlake). Mulligan, so well-known for her graceful countenance, plays against type here as a woman worn-down and impatient with Llewyn’s aimlessness and bad attitude. She essentially does not complete a sentence without including a swear word directed at Llewyn. After all, she’s just found out she’s carrying his child.

This, we swiftly ascertain, is a common refrain for our title character. There is another woman referenced whom he impregnated and helped get an abortion. That situation takes a predictable curve initially, but rather than become the focus it merely lingers. Until eventually, suddenly, Llewyn is made to face it in a particular way. That happens regularly throughout the film, opportunities for him to go in a different direction, all laid out for him like a shiny new second chance, and each time he willfully shoots it down. Even when he seems set, whether by choice or no choice, to dedicate himself to his on-again, off-again occupation as a merchant marine, it goes awry. And it goes awry all on account of his own lazy dismissiveness. No one has ever repeatedly pushed that symbolic boulder up the hill with such bitter indifference. Sisyphus and a cat named Ulysses (that isn’t Llewyn’s but that he dutifully carries around like a Ginger Tom penance). Yeah, it’s the Coens all right.

As with any Coen film, a sense of the surreal pulses throughout, from a cross-country journey that comes across like a hunger-pang hallucination to a nighttime alley encounter that serves as the denouement. Suddenly we realize the film has come full circle, the end was the beginning, we are where we started, so fitting because it underscores the lack (the want) of any progress. If we are the sum of our choices then perhaps the place Llewyn ends up is where he was always meant to be.