{"id":2248,"date":"2018-09-25T16:05:35","date_gmt":"2018-09-25T16:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/?p=2248"},"modified":"2019-01-29T16:56:08","modified_gmt":"2019-01-29T16:56:08","slug":"most-violent-turn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/most-violent-turn\/","title":{"rendered":"A Most Violent Turn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By the midpoint of <em>A Most Violent Year<\/em>, Abel and Anna Morales (Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain) have reached the end of their wits. Outside the office of their New York heating-oil company, Abel is told by an investor that he can no longer help them complete the transaction on a highly-coveted property: a fuel oil terminal on the East River. In the next scene, Anna\u2014who\u2019s just learned one of their drivers was beaten and hijacked for six thousand dollars\u2014sits on the stairs of their home, waiting for Abel to return.<\/p>\n<p>(Full Disclosure: A <em>Most Violent Year<\/em> used <a href=\"https:\/\/endcrawl.com\">Endcrawl<\/a>, which publishes this site.)<\/p>\n<p>This bad news comes amid multiple indictments against the Morales\u2019s heating-oil company. As Anna and Abel\u2019s faith in the future of their business begins to wane, they begin to fade into the background of their own story.<\/p>\n<p>The film\u00a0is director JC Chandor\u2019s 2014 exploration of how personal greed in America shapes one\u2019s identity, Anna\u2019s in particular. The year is 1981 and the Moraleses are struggling to beat their competitors in a big city where violent crime has reached an all-time high.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/o87gG7ZlEAg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The theme of balance weighs heavy on <em>A Most Violent Year<\/em>, with much of the load borne by Abel and Anna\u2019s relationship. Anna\u2019s role as strategist is hinted at early on, with the first words she utters to her husband just before he makes a non-refundable down payment on the East River property: \u201cDon\u2019t do anything stupid,\u201d she remarks. \u201cWe don\u2019t have any money left,\u201d he quips, \u201cwhat else could I possibly do?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The initial transaction goes well enough, but trouble comes in threes\u2014thieves, unmanageable employees, and splintering friendships\u2014and Abel and Anna\u2019s respective responses reveal the couple\u2019s divergence of ideals.<\/p>\n<p>Ambiguity lies beneath the guise of Abel\u2019s righteousness. He plays up a self-made immigrant story to suppress his tenacious greed. As the face of the company, he intentionally avoids discussing their practices\u2014aside from his boasts of how his company grew \u201cthe right way\u201d\u2014leaving his wife to do the dirty work of maintaining their books in an unstable economy.<\/p>\n<p>Anna\u2019s moral stance is icy, protective, and plain\u2014a personality trait developed in her youth. She shows no signs of Abel\u2019s self-deceit; safeguarding the family outweighs all other concerns. At times, cinematographer Bradford Young, ASC riffs off the darkness of her familial history and the mystery of her business acumen by shrouding her in opaque shadow.<\/p>\n<p>The filmmakers spend a lot of time positioning Anna as a passive-reactive type, waiting for Abel to do something\u2014anything\u2014to curb the violence against them, but his stall tactics threaten to upend their lives and uproot their livelihood.<\/p>\n<p>At one point, Anna sits in a grey hospital room with Julian, the company driver who was assaulted, once again anticipating Abel\u2019s arrival. He enters the room. Their competition won\u2019t let the oil terminal purchase go unchallenged. \u201cI\u2019ll take care of it,\u201d he says once again. But this time, Anna is not convinced. She grew up in a mafia family where turf wars were routine. She knows that carving out one\u2019s place in the world means defending one\u2019s territory at all costs.<\/p>\n<h3>A partnership of necessity<\/h3>\n<p>The brilliance of <em>A Most Violent Year<\/em> is that it\u2019s hardly bloody at all. Its violence is the tragedy in Abel\u2019s slow recognition that duplicity in an openly competitive market invites brutality. As he takes the next steps towards legitimacy, he learns the painful lesson that in order to advance in this country, one is called to take from others, something Anna already knows.<\/p>\n<p>Abel\u2019s delusion and desires collide, leaving him on the fence. Should he report the theft to the D.A.? Should he equip his drivers with guns? How can this soft, peaceful, business owner remain clean after wrestling in the mud with his competitors? He can\u2019t choose, which means he can\u2019t move.<\/p>\n<p>Abel is further tested after Julian\u2014also an immigrant\u2014cracks when the fear of further assaults begins to erode his desire to \u201cmake it\u201d in America. Julian\u2019s mother Luisa stalls for time when Abel comes looking for Julian, who\u2019s running from the police for using a firearm without a permit. \u201cAll he wanted is what you have,\u201d she whimpers. Through Julian, we\u2019re offered a glimpse of how Abel might\u2019ve navigated his first years in America; through Luisa, we see how women are tasked with protecting the men in their lives from their own decisions.<\/p>\n<p>This observation comes home to roost for the Moraleses in the film\u2019s final transaction, wherein Abel finally begins to see Anna not just as a gangster\u2019s daughter but as the engine of her family\u2019s success. At home, Abel tells Anna that the oil terminal purchase will go through despite the questionable terms in their agreement. \u201cI worked all my life not to become a gangster,\u201d he laments. \u201cNow they own me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But Anna calmly reveals that any debts they owe on the oil terminal property are taken care of, and she slips him the number of an offshore bank account containing several millions of dollars skimmed off the top of their company\u2019s profits.<\/p>\n<p>Abel is humiliated, but he doesn\u2019t have another plan, and Anna is fed up. \u201cYou\u2019ve been walking around your whole life like it was your hard work or good luck, your charm, your fucking American Dream,\u201d she seethes. \u201cIt was me, doing the things you didn\u2019t want to know about.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>A matter of survival<\/h3>\n<p>Abel felt the pangs of poverty in Mexico, and charges headlong at the American life he\u2019d only read about in newspapers or seen on television in his impoverished home country. He marries a white woman from a powerful family, hardly ever speaks in his native tongue, and shows no compassion for fellow immigrants beyond \u201cgiving them a shot.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But without the stabilizing self-awareness of his own greed, Anna is left to do the unclean work of fulfilling that dream absent any real reciprocity from her husband. Abel has to decide whether he\u2019s willing to let the marriage\u2014and his connection to a white world\u2014go off the rails simply because his wife\u2019s ambition is equal to his own.<\/p>\n<p>Anna\u2019s viciousness and cunning emerge when her family is backed into a corner. Her survivalist mentality reverberates across cultural, racial, and economic lines, as it does for many women in our homes and workspaces who are forced to sacrifice an air of virtue so, at the end of the day, equilibrium may be achieved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How far will we throw our lives out of balance to grasp at social stability?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2250,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2248"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2489,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions\/2489"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}