8/16/15 (Part Two): Two Against the World

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A Most Violent Year, Abel Morales, Albert Brooks, Alessandro Nivola, Alex Ebert, All Is Lost, American Dream, Ben Rosenfield, Bradford Young, capitalism, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Christopher Abbott, cinema, corruption, David Margulies, David Oyelowo, dramas, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Elyes Gabel, family business, film reviews, films, Giselle Eisenberg, heating oil, heists, hijacking, husband-wife relationship, husband-wife team, immigrants, J.C. Chandor, Jason Ralph, Jerry Adler, Jessica Chastain, John Procaccino, Margin Call, Movies, New York City, oil industry, organized crime, Orthodox Jews, Oscar Isaac, period-piece, personal codes, Peter Gerety, Pico Alexander, Quinn Meyers, Ron Patane, set in New York City, set in the 1980's, snubbed at the Oscars, suicide, the American Dream, writer-director

While most people will freely admit to having some sort of unalterable moral code, the reality is much less black and white: I’m willing to wager that we’ve all compromised our personal codes, from time to time…that’s just what life is about. Perhaps you’ve tolerated prejudicial beliefs from an otherwise beloved relative. Perhaps you’re an environmentalist who’s taken a soul-killing corporate job with a King Kong-sized carbon footprint in order to pay the bills. When faced with the choice between suffering for our “code” or bending our beliefs in order to achieve some measure of happiness, it’s tempting to say that we would all be able to stand firm in the face of adversity. It’s tempting, sure…but is it true?

Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), one half of the married couple that stands at the exact center of writer/director J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year (2014), is a man with one of those aforementioned “unalterable moral codes,” an individual who prides himself on always taking “the path that is most right.” Abel is a man with principles, with drive, ambition and an internal compass that always keeps him oriented towards true north…or, as it turns out, his own personal notion of true north. When his world begins to collapse around him, however, Abel will be forced into a rather unenviable position: greet his massing enemies with the violence and corruption that they’ve shown him or stick to his code and, quite possibly, become nothing more than a minor footnote in someone else’s story. As Pink Floyd so eloquently put it: “a walk-on part in the war or a lead role in a cage”…Abel can have either one but he can’t have both.

Kicking off in the Big Apple during the titular “violent year” (also known as 1981), Chandor’s newest opus concerns Abel and his wife, Anna (an absolutely ferocious Jessica Chastain), as they try to carve out their own piece of the American Dream. They own a heating oil company and have just started the process to acquire a prime piece of seafront real estate, all the better to bring in their own shipments directly and cut out the middle man. While Abel tries to pull together the $1.5 million that he’ll need for the deal, he also must deal with a raft of other problems including his mercenary competitors, a nearly non-stop barrage of violent fuel hijacking and an overly zealous district attorney (David Oyelowo) who’s been investigating the Morales’ company for several years.

After another series of thefts, including one where one of Abel’s drivers, Julian (Elyes Gabel), gets his jaw broken, the head of the teamsters (Peter Gerety) insists that all of Abel’s drivers be issued handguns: he refuses to put his men into any more unsafe situations, despite Abel’s protests that faked gun permits are only going to add to his legal woes. As this is going on, Abel surprises an intruder in his home, a shady individual who drops a gun as he flees. Anna, putting two and two together, realizes that the attempted invasion might not be part of the year’s “crime wave” but actually related to their current problems with the company. The message is clear: the Morales’ aren’t safe anywhere, including their own home.

As Abel watches his carefully constructed plan fall apart, piece by piece, he’s goaded by his loose-cannon wife to take more drastic, unsavory measures: she’s the daughter of a mobster, after all, and those guys always know how to take care of business. Abel has that aforementioned “personal code,” however, and he’s determined to do everything on the up-and-up, even if it means putting his family and business through the wringer. When Julian gets attacked again and takes matters into his own hands, however, it forces Abel to scramble and try to put all the pieces back together before his time runs out on the real estate deal. Will Abel stick to his code or will he give in to the violence around him and respond in kind? Will he become the monster that he fears in order to get the life that he deserves?

Extremely stylish, beautifully shot and as cold as an iceberg, A Most Violent Year packs plenty of punch but still manages to fall short (to this viewer, at least) of Chandor’s previous film, the “Redford on a boat” mini-epic, All is Lost (2013). There’s plenty to like and respect here, no doubt: Chandor is a sure-hand as both writer and director, displaying an admirable ability to cut the fat and get right to the meat of the situation. That being said, A Most Violent Year feels too long and bloated for the relatively simple story beats involved: the structure and pacing feel off, leaving too much “dead air” and sapping some of the film’s forward momentum.

One aspect of the film that manages to shoot for the moon and score brilliantly, however, is the extraordinary performances. Front to back, A Most Violent Year is loaded with so many memorable performances and masterfully acted scenes that he handily establishes itself as a real actors’ showcase. The supporting cast, alone, would make the film worth a watch under any other circumstances: Albert Brooks turns in another great, weary performance as Abel’s lawyer/confidant; Oyelowo is solid as a rock as the dogged D.A.; Gabel offers up some genuine anguish as the conflicted Julian (the parallels between his failure and Abel’s success are one of the film’s most subtle motifs) and Jerry Adler (perhaps best known for his recurring roles as Hesh in The Sopranos) brings a surprisingly gentle, paternal quality to his performance as the Orthodox Jewish owner of the property that Abel and Anna are trying to buy.

The real stars of the show, however, are undoubtedly Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. For his part, Isaac downplays the character of Abel masterfully, allowing all of the anger, frustration and fear to bubble and boil just below the surface until it finally explodes skyward in a truly volcanic display. He’s a case study in restraint and chilly resolve and Isaac works wonders with nothing so much as a soft word and piercing glare.

Chastain, on the other hand, is a completely unrestrained force of nature, the raging hurricane that tosses the rest of the cast around like so much flying junk. To not put too fine a point on it, she’s absolutely astounding in the film: it’s impossible to look away whenever she’s onscreen. From the stunning showpiece where she blows away the wounded deer to the fist-raising moment where she tells Oyelowo’s D.A. just where he can shove it, Chastain’s Anna is, easily, one of the most memorable modern cinematic creations.

Less Kay Corleone than Ma Barker, Anna is the true power behind the throne and Chastain tears into the role with absolute gusto. The fact that she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar only goes to show how vapid that particular process is: the fact that her performance was considered a “supporting” role in other nominations only goes to show how flawed that rationale is. Quite plainly, Chastain is as much a part of A Most Violent Year as Isaac is…perhaps more so, to be honest.

Despite the top-shelf performances, gorgeous cinematography (Bradford Young also shot Selma (2014), giving him two prestige pictures in the same year), great score (despite not caring for Alex Ebert’s main gig in Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, his score is absolutely perfect) and effective mise en scene, I still found myself slightly let down by the whole thing. Perhaps it speaks more to personal choice than any major flaws in the film (short of really trite ending to Julian’s arc, there aren’t many major missteps) but A Most Violent Year never quite struck me as “essential,” merely very well-made.

In truth, short of two chase scenes (one decent, the other a real showstopper), the whole film ends up being rather uneventful. Sure, Abel and Anna are faced with a seemingly insurmountable array of problems but each issue ends up being resolved a bit too casually to provide much tension. The resolution of the Julian storyline, the resolution of the fuel hijacking, the resolution of the property deal…in each case, it feels as if Abel and Anna are plucked from the stew-pot just as the water begins to get nice and hot. One of the things that really struck me about the chase scene between Abel and the hijackers is how unhinged and dangerous it felt: for that brief time period, I really found myself questioning the outcome. Were that overriding sense of danger more present throughout the film, perhaps it might have gripped me a little tighter.

Ultimately, A Most Violent Year is a film that deserves no small amount of praise: the performances, alone, are enough to make this a must-watch. That being said, it’s also a film that never quite sunk its claws into me, never quite demanded my complete adoration. Perhaps, in the end, A Most Violent Year is a perfect case of “different strokes for different folks”: extremely well-made and quite evocative, there’s nothing overtly wrong with the film, yet it never quit kicks like it’s supposed to.

That’s quite alright, however: I’ll keep looking forward to Chandor’s films just like I have ever since All is Lost proved him to be a modern master. In an age where “bigger, louder, dumber” seems to rule the box-office, we could always use more films like A Most Violent Year. Essential? Not quite. Worth your time? Without a shadow of a doubt.

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7/7/14: Sometimes Truth is Better Than Fiction

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Alessandro Nivola, Arkansas, Atom Egoyan, based on a book, based on a true story, child killing, cinema, Colin Firth, Damien Echols, Dane DeHaan, Devil's Knot, drama, false accusations, film reviews, films, James Hamrick, Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley, Joe Berlinger, Kevin Durand, Kris Higgins, Mireille Enos, Movies, murdered children, Pam Hobbs, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Reese Witherspoon, Satanic panic, Scott Derrickson, Seth Meriwether, small town life, true crime, West Memphis, West Memphis Three

Sometimes, there’s only so often you can replow the same ground before you have to let it fallow. Farmers know this but, unfortunately, it’s a fact of life that many filmmakers have yet to fully grasp. This can be applied to remakes and “reimaginings” (my personal pet peeves) but it’s just as valid when discussing multiple films made about the same subject. This problem becomes more pronounced when there’s already a “definitive” work on the particular subject, since anything that follows will either seem lesser, by comparison, or will borrow too much from its predecessor in order to capture some of that lightning twice. Such, unfortunately, is the case with Atom Egoyan’s recent crime-drama, Devil’s Knot (2013), which attempts to put a “slightly fictionalized” spin on the true-life story of the West Memphis Three. The problem, of course, is that the same story was already told in a much more definitive way with Joe Berlinger and Sinofsky’s excellent documentary Paradise Lost (1996). When you already have a film (and two follow-up documentaries) that have already examined the subject in great detail, what more could a fictionalized account of the same incident bring? In the case of Devil’s Knot, the answer is a resounding “Not much at all.”

For those not familiar with the circumstances behind the case, here it is, in a nutshell: In 1993, the bound and tortured bodies of three 8-year-old boys were found in the woods outside of West Memphis, Arkansas. Due to the intense interrogation of teenage suspect Jessie Misskelley (who just happened to be mentally handicapped), two other local teens were arrested: Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin. Due to the three boys’ interest in heavy metal, along with Echol’s interest in witchcraft and Aleister Crowley, the small town immediately suspected Satanic influence and the trio were tried and convicted with remarkably little actual evidence: Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life in prison, whereas Echols, seen as the “ringleader,” was sentenced to death. After filmmakers Berlinger and Sinofsky began poking around in the case, they began to find lots of discrepancies, along with plenty of other potential suspects (including some from the various boys’ families). The whole thing began to seem like a witch-hunt and the filmmakers’ resulting documentary, Paradise Lost, became a huge hit and initiated a groundswell of support for the trio, including some rather famous folks like Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins. After new evidence finally surfaced, the three were released from prison in 2011: to this point, no one else has been officially charged in the murders, leaving the whole thing as a tragic, unsolved mystery.

Egoyan’s film, then, takes all of the basic facts from the case (and Paradise Lost) and gives everything a melodramatic sheen, choosing to focus in on the character of Pam Hobbs (Reese Witherspoon), the mother of one of the murdered boys. We begin with a few bits of small-town life before getting right to the terrible crime, as the bodies of the missing boys are found in the woods. After the police lean hard on Jessie (Kris Higgins), he gives up his two “friends,” Damien (James Hamrick) and Jason (Seth Meriwether, looking so much like a teenage Geddy Lee that it became distracting): all three boys have a reputation as misfits and loners which, along with Damien’s penchant for listening to Slayer and carving his girlfriend’s name into his arm, leads the town to make all the connections they need to. This is, of course, despite the fact that we see plenty of other odd occurences going on: a mysterious muddy and bloody man washes up in a local fast-food bathroom, while local ice-cream truck driver, Chris Morgan (Dane DeHaan), acts so strange that it seems impossible to think he’s not guilty of something. There’s also the highly suspicious behavior of one of the boys’ fathers, Mark Byers (Kevin Duran), and local woman, Vicki Hutchenson (The Killing’s Mireille Enos), who seems to be sexually obsessed with Nichols and openly lies about being taken to a “witches’ coven” by the teen.

A “white knight,” such as it were, emerges in the form of Ron Lax (Colin Firth), the highfalutin’ big city lawyer who takes on the trio’s case, pro bono, in the interests of serving justice. He faces plenty of opposition, obviously, not the least of which comes from Pam’s angry husband, Terry (Alessandro Nivola) and Mark Byers. In time, however, Ron begins to chip away at Pam’s resolve regarding the guilt of the trio: at first, she’s positive that they’re guilty but the facts just don’t add up for her and she comes to believe that the three might be innocent, after all. Worst of all, however, Pam begins to suspect that the real killer might be someone close to her…maybe even her own husband.

Right off the bat, Devil’s Knot suffers from one massive problem: it’s telling the exact same story as Paradise Lost but without the benefit of real-life footage. In Paradise Lost, we meet the real Pam and Terry Hobbs, as well as the real Mark and Melissa Myers, which is a much different ballgame than getting their characters filtered through actors like Witherspoon, Nivola and Duran. In Devil’s Knot, we get everything filtered through a distinct layer of melodrama that gives the situation as much gravitas as a made-for-TV movie. In particular, Witherspoon turns in a wildly dramatic performance, highlighted by scenes like the one where she pulls at her hair (after someone asks for a sample, she responds, “Take it all!”) or goes into her dead son’s classroom in order to drop off his last homework assignment and ends up getting hugged by a mob of his classmates. Couple this with her dead son’s propensity to reappear in flashbacks, singing the same Elvis Presley song, ad nauseam, and it’s pretty clear Egoyan and writer Scott Derrickson (himself the director of films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), Sinister (2012) and Deliver Us From Evil (2014)) are much more interested in tugging at the heart-strings than actually exploring the ins-and-outs of this particular tragedy.

There are also issues with the way in which the film introduces certain plot elements (the mysterious man at the fast-food restaurant, the bit about young Stevie Hobbs’ pocketknife, Chris Morgan) without ever fully developing them: it’s as if Egoyan and Derrickson wanted to touch on everything but couldn’t be bothered to tie it all into a cohesive whole. Since Devil’s Knot has the benefit of being released after the trio were set free, it would seem to have access to more information, not less, than the preceding Paradise Lost. Despite this, however, the film feels unbelievably slight, like a Cliff Notes-version of the events. We spend so much time with Pam and Ron that Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley kind of fade into the background: the film seems to want to focus on the victims and their families, yet basically allows Pam Hobbs to just sub-in for all of them. In many ways, this is the story of how she comes to grips with what happened, which ends up marginalizing everyone else’s struggles (including those of the other grieving parents, who are rarely seen).

There’s no denying that the film is well-made: Egoyan has a way of staging everything that can make even the most “innocent” things see ominous and portentous, which is especially evident at the beginning of the film, which is shot almost like a horror movie. While I found the acting to be frequently over-the-top and too “stagey” (Enos is particularly awful, which is strange considering how great she is in The Killing), I was really taken by Firth’s performance: he disappears so completely into the role of the “crusading American lawyer” that it reminded me (fondly) of Hugh Laurie’s performance as the cynical House. Firth ends up being one of the few characters in the film that comes across as genuine, although it’s certainly a case of “too little, too late.”

Ultimately, I’m not sure who Devil’s Knot is supposed to appeal to. Anyone who’s interested in the actual facts of the case would be much better served seeking out Berlinger and Sinofsky’s original film, along with its two sequels, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011): between those three documentaries, just about everything gets laid bare. Fans of true-crime dramas, on the other hand, would be much better suited seeking something that wasn’t so melodramatic and narrowly focused: if one were to remove the West Memphis Three angle, Devil’s Knot is revealed to be a fairly turgid, if well-made, pot-boiler. All in all, Devil’s Knot ends up being a rather out-of-place creation, a film that’s forever doomed to live in the shadow of a much better, more definitive work.