Here's a way in which this film might be better approached

I'm from Argentina, and here we have one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America. Which isn't saying it's safe, but much more moderate in comparison to cartoonishly dangerous places like Venezuela and Honduras. Still, stafety is a very serious nationwide concern and the decline in perception of safeness by the public has been notorious in the past few years. What happens here is something that's not very far from the reality of some parts of America: by virtue of the rise in the hegemony of the media, personal perception begins to be affected by the reporting of the most trusted sources of information. It is very interesting to see how this decline in perception of safety matches the dates historians of journalism (in this case, I speak in a domestic level) pinpoint as the rise of emphasis on the crime sections in the newspapers. With all this I'm trying to make a distinction between the objective crime rate, which is measured methodically through statistics, and unsafety, which in the Argentine social imaginary has become identical with the crime rate.

Now to the film.
I think this film talks about the effects of unsafety (whether they are unfounded or not) and how it molds social relations. Notice how violence and corruption is so deeply internalized that it's taken for granted and a system of expectations forms whereby Abel is seen as week or unconforming for not playing by the rules (which would mean aligning with the Mafia, arming his drivers, etc.). Abel is an idealist and a relentless optimist who is bound to face reality and learn that ethics are not dictated by abstract products of consciousness but by a grasping of the context. It becomes clearly impossible for him at some point to conciliate his ideals of honesty with the crooked things he has to do to achieve the goals he is not willing to give up.

A Most Violent Year explores in detail how the collapse in the perceptions of lawfullness and the distrust of institutions break down the remaining humanity in even the virtuous. Abel never asked for it, but he has to quietly accept the money his wife has been skimming from the company for the sake not only of his family but of his co-workers for which he feels enormously responsible. In addition to that, he has to face much more deep-rooted values such as patriarchy as he faces a crisis in his masculinity in the form of his inability to protect his family. All this atmosphere of violence and the pressure to accept it as an alternative to the failures in communication is, in my opinion, very thoroughly depicted without the necessity of the raw, explicit violence many here were feeling it was owed to them (to be sure, having seen Prince of the City for the first time last week, this is exactly what I was expecting too). I'm sure the director wished to distance himself from those exploitative forms so typical of American cinema and make a film about, not really violence, but about everything that sorrounds it.

I think that if the film pays tribute to the style of Sidney Lumet, the aspect it retains the most is the late filmmaker's exploration of relativity in moral systems and the plight of those on the verge of self-deception.