A Most Violent Year · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camel-hair coat is the first thing the film teaches you to read. Abel Morales wears it like armor and like a costume at once, and Oscar Isaac carries it through dim wood-paneled rooms where a real-estate deal and a veiled threat get traded in the same measured breath. The coat says one thing over and over: I am legitimate, I am composed, I will not become what this city expects me to become. Watch for an hour and you understand that the whole picture is built on that refusal — and that the refusal is precisely what Deleuze would call a crisis.

Start with the genre it inherits. The gangster film is the purest engine of what Deleuze named the action-image: a situation presses on a man until he commits the decisive act that transforms it. Think of the large form — an encompassing milieu (1981 New York, flagged in the opening title as one of the most violent years on record) calling forth a hero who finally acts. Michael Corleone in Part II is the template Chandor films directly inherit, down to the amber-lit near-shadow interiors where family-business decisions get made. The machine runs on a sensory-motor circuit: the world provokes, the hero strikes back, the situation resolves.

A Most Violent Year perceives that situation in full — trucks hijacked, a district attorney circling the books, a thirty-day window to close the deal or lose everything, a wife who never forgot where the money comes from urging him toward harder measures — and then it withholds the act. Abel will not pick up the gun the genre keeps pressing into his hand. This is the crisis of the action-image: the postwar condition Deleuze located in characters who can no longer, or will not, react adequately to what they perceive. They stop being agents and become watchers — seers. The two set pieces the film is proudest of, a foot chase through tunnels and a confrontation on a bridge, draw their force from how little the image gives and how little gets discharged. Dread with no release. The thriller's accelerator is bolted down.

Isaac's body does the work the plot won't. Deleuze has a term for a posture that exposes a social relation rather than advancing the story — the gest. Abel's lowered voice, his deliberate stillness, the coat itself: this is legitimacy performed so completely that we cannot find the seam between the man and the performance. It is cinema of the body, duration carried by attitude, a man managing himself in real time while everyone around him has stopped believing the line he's drawn.

Look at where all this happens. Bradford Young shoots the city as an any-space-whatever — Deleuze's name for space that has lost its job as a setting for action and become pure affective terrain. Waste ground, frozen waterfront, tunnels, skies the color of dirty snow, interiors lit as if by a single failing bulb, faces turned into silhouette. Young underexposes to the threshold of legibility, and the look is also the argument: the world will not hold light, and here is a man trying to keep his footing on it.

Why is the year so violent if we barely see violence? Because the violence is the originary world beneath the derived milieu. The heating-oil business — ledgers, loans, negotiations, the camel coat — is the social surface. Under it runs a naturalist world of pure drive and decay, an irreversible line of slope toward ruin, and the film lets it surface only at the seams: Julian, the hijacked driver, traumatized past repair, is where the slope shows through. Abel keeps insisting on the legal path, and the film is honest enough to let that insistence read two ways at once — as principle, and as competitive advantage, since legitimacy is itself an edge. He moves among gangster clichés straining not to enact them, and the film knows that he knows. Call it a consciousness of clichés: the genre script is in the room, and the drama is whether he can keep refusing to read his lines.

The craft debts are exact. The behavior-over-exposition procedural — long scenes of lawyers and deals as the real action — comes from Lumet's New York, Prince of the City and Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico. The watchful stillness and ambient menace, quiet as the sign of threat, extend The Conversation; Alex Ebert's non-thriller score and the rationed gunshots are its heirs. From the two Godfather films Chandor takes the legitimate-businessman front and Pacino's willed composure — and inverts it, because Isaac's Abel echoes that bearing in order to refuse the slide that defined it.

What the film did to its genre is simple and hard. It kept the gangster picture's dread and removed its discharge — the machine left idling, charged, never firing — and proved the deal-under-threat could carry the whole drama. Rewatch it once and do one thing: count the places where the film hands Abel the gun, and watch him set it down.