A Most Violent Year (15.)
Directed by J.C. Chandor.
Starring Oscar Isaacs, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo, Elyes Gabel, Alessandro Nivolo and Albert Brooks. 125 mins
Despite the title, this is actually Not That Violent A Film. Set in New York in 1981, statistically the most dangerous in the city's history, the title is a bit of a cheap trick, considering the film is actually about a business deal. It works though: even the most mundane scene is imbued with an undercurrent of menace and threat. You are always half expecting something terrible to happen, but it rarely does.
Whereas Coppola in The Godfather used organised crime as a metaphor for big business, Chandor (All Is Lost) rather redundantly reverses the equation, making big business a metaphor for organised crime. Abel Morales (Isaacs) is the boss of Standard Oil and having a tough time. While he tries to land the biggest deal of his career, his trucks are being hijacked on the streets of NY by gun-totting hoodlums and the DA (Oyelowo) is investigating him for corruption. Morales – the names is significant – always makes a big thing of being a decent man, a man of integrity who does the right thing, even though he got his break by marrying the daughter (Chastain) of a local mobster
Everywhere he goes he is surround by the double takes of people who are never quite sure if he is self deluded or shameless. A similar uncertainty pervades the whole film: you are never quite sure how literal anything is in this film. It is a meaty drama yet somehow inconsequential. The setting is early eighties but the feel is pure 70s New York, cinema's most dramatic milieu but given a murky, wintry coating for this reserved, softly spoken critique of American capitalism.
All Is Lost
Directed by J.C. Chandor.
Starring Oscar Isaacs, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo, Elyes Gabel, Alessandro Nivolo and Albert Brooks. 125 mins
Despite the title, this is actually Not That Violent A Film. Set in New York in 1981, statistically the most dangerous in the city's history, the title is a bit of a cheap trick, considering the film is actually about a business deal. It works though: even the most mundane scene is imbued with an undercurrent of menace and threat. You are always half expecting something terrible to happen, but it rarely does.
Whereas Coppola in The Godfather used organised crime as a metaphor for big business, Chandor (All Is Lost) rather redundantly reverses the equation, making big business a metaphor for organised crime. Abel Morales (Isaacs) is the boss of Standard Oil and having a tough time. While he tries to land the biggest deal of his career, his trucks are being hijacked on the streets of NY by gun-totting hoodlums and the DA (Oyelowo) is investigating him for corruption. Morales – the names is significant – always makes a big thing of being a decent man, a man of integrity who does the right thing, even though he got his break by marrying the daughter (Chastain) of a local mobster
Everywhere he goes he is surround by the double takes of people who are never quite sure if he is self deluded or shameless. A similar uncertainty pervades the whole film: you are never quite sure how literal anything is in this film. It is a meaty drama yet somehow inconsequential. The setting is early eighties but the feel is pure 70s New York, cinema's most dramatic milieu but given a murky, wintry coating for this reserved, softly spoken critique of American capitalism.
All Is Lost
