A Most Violent Year
That was not what I expected from that title. A deep character study about American immigrants, several possible paths for the same starting point. You either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain, and our protagonist has been around for a long time.
The bigger contrast is with the truck driver. They seem to have the same background, but our protagonist did the right thing and was lucky as hell, while his worker is living in the Reagan era, when his boss is in the middle of a turf war with mobsters. For that dude, is ambition is his downfall. He wants American success so much, he is willing to pack heat on his deliveries even after the boss explicitly warns him against it, and does his big speech about doing the right thing.
The lawyer is just a regular WASP dude embedded in the gangster business. He’s successful anyway, as part of the intelligentsia, ruthless tactics are just the cost of doing business, nothing fazes him as he has nothing on the line.
The wife, that Lady Macbeth, represents the devil in his shoulder. As daughter of a high-level crook, the law is more a guideline anyway, she probably knows she is trash and will always be trash, no need to seek validation from the system. Steal as much as possible, lie and cheat, go as further as possible. Go full psycho on dying deer on the side of the road, just go to town!
The big question remains: is all that an act? There are hints with the salesman pitch, the whole image projection capabilities, charisma, reality distortion field, whatever you want to call it. When our protagonist finds out about the fences buying up his stolen goods, he threatens them, but strictly above-the-belt attacks, all on the up and up. Is he just naive for trusting his lieutenants, or just wants plausible deniability, but reaping the upside?
He gets pretty angry at knowing that his wife stashed away nearly a million over the years, but then he takes the dirty money anyway. It all works out in the end, since the DA is also a crook, wants a higher up job and is willing to drop the charges in exchange for political capital in the future. Makes the whole process feel like a shakedown, even know we know our protagonist (or her wife) have been skimming large amounts of money from the company.
Not many characters come away unscathed here. The low contrast sepia-ish tone makes everything puke-coloured, a fitting look for such grey morality tale. A large crack on an American Exceptionalism Dream.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.