Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Most Violent Year
2014 · J.C. Chandor · A Most Violent Year on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how dark the interiors stay, even during the day. (light)
Bradford Young underexposes to the edge of what you can read. Rooms look lit by one failing bulb. Faces drop into silhouette. The skies come out the color of dirty snow.
Payoff: This city will not hold light. You spend the film straining to see, which is close to Abel's own position.
Watch Oscar Isaac's voice drop when someone else raises theirs. (performance)
Isaac plays Abel as willed composure: lower voice, deliberate stillness, hands kept quiet. He performs legitimacy so completely that you cannot locate the seam between the man and the performance.
Payoff: The composure is a claim about who he is, made with his body, to everyone in the room. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that exposes a social position rather than advancing the plot.
Look at the camel coat and when he puts it on. (setting)
The coat moves through wood-paneled rooms where a real-estate deal and a veiled threat get traded in the same measured breath. It works as armor and as costume, and Chandor keeps it in frame.
Payoff: The wardrobe makes his argument before he opens his mouth. It says he is a legitimate man.
Watch who moves in an argument and who holds still. (staging)
Chandor stages confrontation through proximity rather than movement. People stand close and stay put. The geometry of who is positioned where carries the scene instead of blocking or action.
Payoff: The pressure in these rooms is positional. Nobody raises a voice and you still know who has the advantage.
Listen for how rarely you hear a gunshot. (sound)
Alex Ebert's score stays low and ambient and never announces a thriller. The design hands you traffic, machinery and cold rooms. Overt violence is suppressed nearly everywhere in a film about a violent year.
Payoff: When a shot does land it is shocking, because the picture has spent so long refusing you one.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the coat. Abel performs a legitimate man every minute, and the film never shows you where the performance ends.