A Most Violent Year

A Most Violent Year

To American movie made in 1970s of a certain type becomes irresistible to directors whose childhood was in the ’80s and ’90s with cable TV and home videos filled with such movies. They are visually and thematically dark, largely male. The lighting is Rembrandt; the palette is paper bag brown, burnt yellow, leprous emerald, dirty cream. Talk of honor and integrity and tradition; old ways dying, meaner new ways being born.

An organized crime film or family drama or big-city nightmare but not likable. This character, our hero, though shy about selling what’s left of his soul to get ahead in this world realizes soon enough that he needs to be cold blooded and clear-eyed if he wants to succeed here below. Honesty won’t get you anywhere you want to go in “A Most Violent Year,” a 1981 New York City period piece written and directed by J.C. Chandor (“All Is Lost,” “Margin Call”). Oh boy is it ever that kind of movie. It’s pretty good at being that kind of movie. But still: for what it is seems slightly exasperating when it comes down to it (that is).

Oscar Isaac stars as Abel Morales, the head of a heating oil company that was initially owned by his father-in-law. He recently purchased a port property, but only has one month to raise enough capital from investors or he’ll have to eat the down payment and go bankrupt. This is a high stakes gamble that could pay off massively if things break right for him but “if” is a word that seldom favors heroes in these sorts of movies.

He’s being investigated for business improprieties; the D.A. (David Oyelowo) is riding him hard. As if all of this weren’t enough, Morales’ business is also being squeezed by competitors. And now someone’s hijacking his trucks: it happens during the opening credits, when he and his lawyer Andrew (Albert Brooks, sly and smart and generally unrecognizable as always) are delivering the cash.

We don’t know who’s behind these attacks on Morales’ company; all we know is that he’s racing against time to close this deal with only 30 days left and his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain, doing an admirable Brooklyn accent) isn’t helping matters any. She’s a tough ally (“My husband is an honest man,” she tells another character, “don’t mistake his honesty for weakness”), as well as a wily bookkeeper; but she’s also something of a Lady Macbeth figure who constantly eggs her husband on to be harder than he already is because this is hard world where their children will be eaten alive if they’re not careful.

The film follows Abel, Anna or both of them trying to come up with money for their collective endeavor.The title refers to an actual statistical designation: 1981 was New York City’s most violent year up until then there were 1,841 homicides (the number rose until 1991 before starting to fall). That plus the retro look and rhythm and content this is a dirty business movie, a crime film, a crusading New York DA story and also an homage to “The Godfather” and “The Conversation” cinematographer Gordon Willis, among many other ’70s-movie touchstones it all feels like a romance with a past that might be somebody else’s Brigadoon of urban ethnic machismo as seen through the eyes of a 2010s American middle class filmmaker.

The picture is so funereal that at times it seems less like a memorial service for certain kinds of American drama than for the male heroes who populated them: It’s like one final glimpse of what may have been the last era in U.S. history when men could be Men, in that old fashioned two fisted furrowed brow and whispered threats sort of way.

This sideways tribute has been made before by James Gray, an American director whose movies are often gangster pictures with Sidney Lumet (“Serpico”) pacing; or big city thrillers with Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola (the latter directed Gray in “The Yards”).

Some parts of the film recall “The Yards,” which was director James Gray’s mash note to “On the Waterfront” and “The Godfather,” and his next movie, the gangster picture/undercover cop thriller “We Own the Night” (which, like “A Most Violent Year,” is sporadically terrific but sometimes tries too hard to be a K-Tel Greatest ’70s Macho Movie Hits album). But ultimately Chandor’s film has its own vibe, no small thing given what it’s up against.

The look and performances carry it. There are some marvelous New York locations, some craftily staged moments of suspense and violence, and some smart uses of TV newscasts as a more or less unremarked-upon Greek chorus. Even when the financial conversations get repetitive, even when Chastain is slightly underused (and she is), “A Most Violent Year” sticks with you.

It’s not even the best tribute to American New Wave cinema in theaters this year: that would be “Inherent Vice,” a meandering yet vibrant piece that seems to have absorbed every bit of popular art that ever informed writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s aesthetic sensibility, and seems to have nothing to prove and be content about it. And there are other recent movies rooted in post Vietnam America that could be mentioned here: Gray’s own “Godfather II” inspired “The Immigrant,” for instance though lovely period romance told from a female perspective set deeper in the past or any number of films by directors such as William Friedkin (“Sorcerer”) or John Carpenter (“Assault on Precinct 13,”) which were made at low budgets during lean years and didn’t make much money but became beloved classics anyway.

No director working today can match Gray for sheer depth of knowledge; he knows why he loves movies, he knows what he loves about them, and he gives you every bit of it. Chandor doesn’t have Gray’s reach or depth of feeling in “A Most Violent Year,” but he’s a major talent all the same emphasis on potential. If this comes on TV, you’ll watch most of it, though there may be points where you wish you were watching the movies that inspired it.

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