J.C. Chandor’s surgical precision

By Tom Shone

As Abel Morales, the oil distributor struggling to keep his business afloat in “A Most Violent Year”, Oscar Isaac wears a big camel-hair coat, looks people dead in the eye and speaks in the crisp, precise diction of a man who has learned that power comes with not raising your voice. “You must take the path that is most right,” he says—a lesson close to the heart of this sombre, slightly dry, urgent film about one man’s attempts not to become a gangster in the New York of 1981. Its director, J.C. Chandor, has chosen his location and period with great care. The drama stems from the fact that in the New York of 1981—a city that boasted more than 1,800 murders—there were probably more reasons for a struggling oil distributor to become a gangster than there were reasons not to. It’s a film about criminality’s slow, gravitational suck—the steady drip, drip, drip of difficulties that one day makes brushing past the law seem easier than waiting in line.

The film works swiftly to hem Morales in. To start with, his trucks are being brutally hijacked and relieved of their oil—possibly by one of his competitors—and his drivers want guns to better defend themselves. But is that such a great idea with the nosy assistant district attorney (David Oyelowo) preparing to indict him on unspecified charges of corruption? “We may have pushed things a little far” admits his lawyer, played by a wonderfully shifty Albert Brooks, and it is part of the film’s precisely calibrated moral murk that we never find out what those charges are exactly, or how deserved. Finally, there is his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), a beautiful gorgon in figure-hugging Armani and with long ruby nails, itching to call in her mafioso brothers and father to sort things out. “You’re not going to like it when I get involved,” she purrs, like Jersey Shore’s answer to Lucrezia Borgia.