Chandor: A Most Violent Year (2014)

On the face of it, A Most Violent Year is yet another period piece about the 70s and late 80s, taking its title from the notorious crime spree that hit New York City in 1981. For the most part, however, J.C. Chandor refrains from period detail, opting instead for stretches of light and air that always seem to leave the city at a distance, or make it feel like a dream along one of the many trucking routes that hold the narrative together. Buried in there is a story about an entrepreneur (Oscar Isaac), his wife (Jessica Chastain) and the shadowy forces threatening their freight business, but the film feels as remote from them as it does from the city itself, unfolding across one exurban satellite and ring road after another, and abstracting itself as it proceeds, until the cinematography starts to feel more like light sculpture, especially during the interior sequences. That’s not exactly to say that it’s devoid of narrative but that it continues J.C. Chandor’s project of recrafting the information thriller for an era in which it’s simply taken for granted that we’re surrounded by an inchoate, imperceptible stream of data flow all the time. Key to Chandor’s vision is simply continuing to take that for granted, overwhelming us with how much we might be expected to take for granted in turn, and approaching genre cinema much like A Most Violent Year approaches New York, from the outside, from the perspective of everything we’re expected to exlude about what we take for granted. As a result, there’s a kind of perpetual obscurity to Chandor’s genre exercises, a sense that all his films are shot and paced as nocturnes, beholden to an all-night data-trickle that’s further intensified here, congealing the city to a glare on the horizon that polishes the surface of the film even as it sinks beneath its sensory threshold. Of course, digital complexity and cinematography is peculiarly disinterested in distinctions between night and day, or between natural and artificial light, which makes a digital nocturne sound a bit like a contradiction in terms. But Chandor reinvents nocturne so that the very moment at which darkness falls is the darkest moment, even as that also makes it the brightest moment, the moment at which complexity comes closest to visibility, or the membrane between waking and digital life becomes most permeable. As in David Fincher and Jeff Cronenweth’s collaborations, light suddenly feels tidal rather than diurnal, except that here it’s not a tide that’s endlessly receding but a tide that’s perpetually turning, caught in the slack water between day and night, and stressed out as only slack water can be fully stressed.