MOVIE REVIEW: A Most Violent Year

Stars: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, Albert Brooks, David Oyelowo, Alessandro Nivola

Director:  J.C. Chandor

Screening: selected cinemas

Rating: ★★★

IN the long and bloody history of the American gangster film, honest types come and often quickly go. They’re the saps or the suckers or the simply straight folk who don’t stand a chance against a loaded gun or a rigged game.

One of the telling strengths of J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year – a tense, detailed period thriller – is that the protagonist is a decent person making a stand in an unscrupulous world, one where the temptation to sink to your adversaries’ level is hard to resist.

First seen running uphill – a burden he never really puts behind him – Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) is nominally an American success story: an immigrant who started as a driver at a New York heating oil firm and now, in 1981, owns the firm, running it alongside his calculating wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain). Abel has the suits, the adorable children and the suburban mansion, but they’re merely symbols masking a brutal everyday milieu.

Even as he closes a deal to acquire a dock and terminal on the East River that will give him a decisive measure of market leverage, Abel’s Standard Oil is under siege from armed hijackers who take his trucks and sell the contents. 

His drivers are scared; their union rep, Bill O’Leary (Peter Gerety), wants to arm them; his banker, Arthur Lewis (John Procaccino), is getting nervous about providing the loan for the land purchase; and his competitors are divided into two camps: the charmless and amoral and the charming and amoral.

The usual path Abel would follow in the movies is downwards, lowering himself to the crimes of his rivals and then outdoing them: a tactical triumph and a spiritual defeat, leaving him like Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather. But Chandor tends to avoid the obvious.

Here Abel walks a balancing act, trying to protect his family from personal threats and his company from sabotage.

 The film’s territory is shadowy offices and bombed-out streets in boroughs decades away from gentrification. This is the New York of Sidney Lumet’s best films, such as Serpico and Prince Of The City – an analog world of cash in briefcases, confrontations at barbershops and traditional family businesses. Chandor illustrates individuals and tribes alike with threatening framing and uneasy detail.

But if A Most Violent Year is more sombre in tone than the title suggests, it does make apparent that for everything Abel achieves  nothing is fully resolved. If it’s good to be bad, it’s nearly impossible to be good.