Violent Year’ … 1981 Final Copy

We remember that director J.C. Chandor’s last movie put us in a sinking boat in the middle of an unfriendly sea with Robert Redford, a cool fellow facing a disaster, but remaining calm, remaining erect, swallowing his fear and maintaining appearances even in the face of loss and death.

This must be a theme that Chandor is comfortable with, maybe a story in his own life. For in his “A Most Violent Year” we get a similar guy, same scenario, but dressed in different colors. Our hero here is Abel Morales, (Oscar Isaac) equally cool, and facing his own impending disaster. Morales wants to fashion a life centered around honesty and principles, a fragile craft unsuitable for the turbulent sea of New York of 1981, recorded as the most violent year in the history of the city.

Abel is faced with a dilemma. He is in the unglamorous heating oil business, beset by some invisible enemies who keep hijacking his trucks, beating up his drivers and stealing thousands of gallons of precious fuel. Abel finds himself surrounded by a coven of other heating oil men, shadier, more dishonest thugs who are doing much better than he.

But Abel doesn’t want to be like them. Somewhere in his childhood, nurtured by his father’s love, he acquired those fragile principles. Perhaps he was listening to the nuns in his Bronx Catholic school. His childhood is never fully explored here.

But on this day, this violent day in this violent year, Abel has the chance to break away from the past and become the man of honor he has always imagined for himself. He moves through the film with a sense of honor and bravery, a kind of urban super hero, as though the belted tan camel hair top coat he wears constantly throughout, is a cape that will deflect his enemies.

Today, Abel has made a deal with a group of older, real estate rich, powerful religious Jews to acquire a shore line dock piece of property with storehouses and valuable access to the river and the ocean. The deal involves the investment of two briefcases of cash and a time sensitive contract: two weeks or the deal goes south and he loses his money.

Abel has all the pieces on his table. But there is someone out there, perhaps more than one, of his competitors, who is trying to stop him. The film takes us on a man by man check list until we find the enemy.

Abel, throughout his path to his goal, remains unbowed. After all, he has Anna, his wife, (Jessica Chastain) a girl from the neighborhood, the daughter of a retired Joe Columbo-like gangster, who never appears, a retired but still-powerful presence who could help.

Anna is Chastain in a different kind of role. She has a sumptuous blonde body and dresses to show it. She takes care of their two daughters, but with a Lady Macbethian stride, she is never far away from Abel’s side. Abel knows that with one phone call to her father, one bended knee, his enemies will shrink away, his problems vanish. It’s not an option.

Chandor moves his narrative slowly through decaying streets, opulent homes and shadowy meetings in borough bars full of familiar faces. David Oyelowo, fresh from the bridge in “Selma,” is a tough, but corruptible District Attorney in a complete change of face.

There is no “Godfather” chain of explosions or killings. Instead, with his brilliant cinematographer Bradford Young, Chandor shows us a 1981 post-apocalyptic New York full of ruins with streets full of broken glass and crumpled papers like an aging Miss Universe with running mascara and her lipstick smeared. In one tense chase scene, Chandor huddles a car full of frightened passengers together smelling of defeat and fear, waiting not for the next stop, but the last. Brilliant.

Unlike the mobsters of his home streets, Abel is alone, but for Anna and his middle-aged life-weary friend and lawyer Andrew (a wonderful, offbeat performance by comic Albert Brooks.)

Chandor and Isaac work well together, giving us a man on a tightrope without a net, for whom falling is not an option. Abel is a dreamer with a plan, and an unrelenting faith in a higher power that is more Horatio Alger than God.

For Chastain, always good, always different, Anna is a “let’s do it for fun” part that required, for her, no heavy lifting.

Isaac, who has been weaving his way up from the failing guitar player in “Inside Llewyn Davis” and con man in “The Two Faces of January,” has always had promise. In this role, he keeps it. His Abel will be compared with Pacino’s Michael Corleone, but it’s only Pacino’s shiny hair and tan camel hair coat. In heart and soul, Abel belongs to Oscar Isaac.

Not quite up to the sharp focus of his “Margin Call” and “All Is Lost,” Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year” is still compelling and full of great performances, equal doses of tension and hope. The final scene on the banks of a dirty river shows us four people, players caught in a toss up: redemption or regret.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.