A Most Violent Year (15)
four stars
Dir: JC Chandor
With: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain
Runtime: 125 minutes
BETWEEN his directorial debut with the Oscar-nominated financial crisis thriller Margin Call, to the one man and his boat drama All Is Lost starring Robert Redford, JC Chandor has been making quite the name for himself as a filmmaker who is pleasingly old school when it comes to his love of strong stories and solid performances.
A Most Violent Year shows Chandor coming of age with a New York set crime drama that is smart, bleak, and compulsively watchable.
The year of the title is 1981, a time when the New York of today - tourist-friendly, relatively low crime, glittering with money - was still a world away. The streets that new American citizen Abel Morales has to walk, and earn a living from, are distinctly mean.
Played by Oscar Isaac (between this film and Ex Machina, this is now officially Oscar Isaac Week), Morales runs his own haulage firm. If there is something to truck, he will truck it. He wants to be a good man doing his best in a bad world, but he is having an increasingly hard time. His ambitious wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) wants him to succeed at any cost to give the family a better life, while his less scrupulous rivals simply want him to get out the way and leave the field clear for them.
Chandor has a lot of fun with the period, questionable tailoring and dodgy haircuts included. He also puts the grit back into New York, exposing its cold, hard-knock heart. With the stage set, the perfectly matched Isaac and Chastain duly do their thing as the husband and wife on different pages.
With its slow burn style, Chandor's picture harks back to the Hollywood films of the Seventies. There are fireworks, but they are used sparingly, and the film is all the more riveting for that restraint. A most impressive picture.
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