Up until about twenty years ago, New York City was the best movie location in the world. No other city so effortlessly was a character itself in hundreds of films. As a presence, old New York has the same appeal as a great character-actor: it’s memorable, versatile and never gives a bad performance. There are fire hydrants on 42nd Street that are better actors than half of Hollywood. New York can play elegant and it can play dangerous. A filmmaker can shoot the city like it’s a sexy woman and shoot it like it’s a dark anti-hero costumed in graffiti and garbage. Both are convicing. A camera loves blight as much as it loves beauty, and that’s why it loves New York City. Taxi Driver couldn’t be set anywhere else and neither could Manhattan. Even in a bad movie, the New York of the 60s, 70s and 80s has a will of its own that feels like it’s beyond the script.
Today, New York City is more like an urban theme park. It’s still an exciting place, but it’s also traded most of its danger for Disney. If Travis Bickle had been born twenty years later, he might be all right.
That’s a good thing, by the way. Of all things to be nostalgic about, a higher crime rate could be the dumbest. One could argue that shiny chain restaurants in place of old Times Square strip clubs is a lateral move at best when it comes to things that enrich the culture, but at least fewer people are scared. New York City is safer now. It’s cuddly. The streets are clean and the pimps have toned down their wardrobe.
And we may never have another great New York City movie again.
I don’t think there’s been one made in the past twenty years that wouldn’t be exactly the same if it was set in Chicago or Philadelphia.
It’s for that reason that a cult persists for anything related to New York in its wilder days. Any film where the characters cruise The Deuce, sex palace lights dappling their windshield like electric raindrops and hookers calling from the curb. Any film where the subways look like deathtraps. Any film that dives deep enough into the flea-pit that you feel like you might get a rash through the screen. Any film that feels like the characters could be mugged or shot or run into a crazy person at any moment.
So, some of us looked forward to A Most Violent Year. Its title is a reference to 1981, the year when New York City’s crime rate was at its highest, you could still catch a porn film at 2 AM on Times Square and Robert De Niro was still a great actor.
And this is a good movie. It’s not great. It tries. It’s competent. Its heart is in the right place. It’s got a little muscle to it and it offers us Oscar Isaac following up his work in Inside Llewyn Davis with another juicy lead role. He’s the last honest businessman in a world gone mad. He walks the straight line while everyone else is seemingly as crooked as a Silly Straw. He runs an oil delivery company that’s getting ambitious and just taken a make-or-break move at expansion only for his trucks to get randomly hijacked in broad daylight by dirtbags who beat the hell out of the drivers and then make off with the black gold.
The weakness here is that it’s a little too sober, kinda dry, even with the feverish performances. It’s Al Pacino and Sidney Lumet secondhand and watered down. It’s entertaining, but not vital. Not like the films that influenced it were. I spent this whole film looking for a unique personality, but never found it. Oh, I get the point of the period setting. The most violent year of a city runs parallel to the most tumultuous year of these characters’ lives. Only problem is that this period is already so well-documented in so many films that anyone who’s thirty-five years late to the party better cough up something startling. Writer/director J.C. Chandor is full of respect for the past, but never works up any bile.