A Most Violent Year

With his third feature, A Most Violent Year, J. C. Chandor has firmly established himself as the most exciting new filmmaker of the decade. His début film, Margin Call (2011), was a tightly scripted low-budget indie with an A-list cast and a lean, taut structure about two tense days and nights during a Wall Street meltdown. He followed that hyperverbal ensemble picture with 2013's All Is Lost, a survival-at-sea thriller with barely any spoken lines and only one character. Now, in A Most Violent Year, Chandor has pivoted yet again to create an expansive period crime drama in the powerful but understated tradition of Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) and Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978). The only common elements of Chandor's three distinctive pictures are their exceptional acting and the assured hand of their writer/director.

A Most Violent Year takes place in New York City during the winter of 1981—statistically, one of the most crime-ridden times in the city’s history. Chandor tells the story of Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), an immigrant businessman chasing the American dream as honestly and in as upstanding a fashion as his circumstances allow. Abel owns a company that sells heating oil, having worked his way up from truck driver, and we meet him on the verge of closing the biggest deal of his life. But the industry is rife with political corruption and mob violence, and Abel struggles daily to succeed without compromising his integrity, as his competitors try to drag him down to their level and destroy everything he's built. Although the story's scale is small, its themes resonate universally.

Isaac broke out playing the titular role in the 2014 Coen Brothers movie Inside Llewyn Davis, but in this film he proves himself a bona fide movie star. It’s been a long time since a young actor commanded the screen with such controlled strength and charisma. His Abel recalls the great roles of Al Pacino in the ‘70s and Andy Garcia in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, and it's not hyperbole to call this the best performance of 2014, a year that includes Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, David Oyelowo in Selma, and Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. Isaac will get less attention then those other three talents because he’s not playing a real-life person, but it’s is actually more exciting to watch a first-rate actor breath life into a fictional persona with this kind of originality. Chandor accentuates Isaac’s exceptional work with an outstanding script and a crack supporting cast—featuring Oyelowo, Albert Brooks, Alessandro Nivola, Peter Gerety, Jerry Adler, and many other familiar faces. Each actor turns their small part into a rich, complex character; a feat that's all the more impressive because this type of movie can easily become a bag of forced clichés if the writing isn’t pitch-perfect and the actors aren’t credible. Jessica Chastain exquisitely embodies the way every choice made by this cast and their director makes the movie come across as vividly authentic. Most actresses would overplay the smart, tough-talking role of Abel’s wife Anna, but rather than steal every scene she’s in, Chastain deftly shifts the focus away from herself, bringing out the best in her scene partners. This is truly what I envision of when I think of the term “best supporting actor.”

A Most Violent Year is a gritty, no-nonsense, old-fashioned movie that almost seems like it could have been made in 1981. I say “almost” because Chandor and cinematographer Bradford Young create the film’s period look in ways that can’t help but feel digital instead of photochemical. The color pallet and black levels have many of the telltale qualities of being created in a post-production house, rather than in a camera. It's a minor complaint, especially since the film’s subtle and evocative ‘80s New York details never draw undue attention to themselves, but unlike David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) or Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012), I never forgot that I was watching a contemporary film.