If you have happened upon this review months after publication, we apologise for beginning with mention of the perennially silly Academy Awards. But that chatter is in the air as we write. There were socio-political reasons to rage about the underperformance of Selma. The complete shutout accorded JC Chandor's brilliant A Most Violent Year – on the surface an Oscar-friendly release – triggers merely bafflement and weary resignation.
The key phrase in the above paragraph is, perhaps, "on the surface". With its provocative title, its early 1980s setting and its gangland subplots, Chandor's third film promises the faux-Scorsese moves that powered the ordinary American Hustle to hatfuls of nominations.
Forget that. Here is a rare film that is remarkable for what it is not. It is a movie about violence that features almost no gunplay. It is set in a very particular period, but refuses to fetishise that period. It is unquestionably a New York picture, but Manhattan is always across the river or over the horizon. Most surprising of all, it is actually interested in the business of business.
Spreading himself generously across two of this week's releases – he can also be seen to advantage in Ex Machina – a sleek Oscar Isaac turns up as Abel Morales, the owner of a surging heating-oil supply business. These are the winter months of early 1981, allegedly the most violent year in New York City's history, and Abel is having trouble advancing without kowtowing to organised crime.
His wife, played by Jessica Chastain with flashing talons and daytime-soap cleavage, is a little perturbed by his unwillingness to set morality aside. This is the sort of Lady Macbeth who, after hitting a moose on the highway, will not pause to pull out a Saturday-night special and finish it off.
The film hangs around a business deal that, though modest enough, could nudge Abel from coming man to junior mogul. As he seeks to close on a property in Brooklyn, trucks continue to get hijacked, salesmen are beaten up and an ambitious district attorney (David Oyelowo), presaging a change in the city’s direction, prepares indictments for false declaration of income.
You couldn't call A Most Violent Year a work of naturalism. Chandor, director of Margin Call and All is Lost, is very much at home with bold visual gestures. Throughout the picture, Morales wears a striking camel-hair coat that comes to act as armour against the corruption without. Chastain's aquiline nails are scarcely less symbolic. Their sprawling house in Westchester County is a paradoxical masterpiece of uncomfortable luxury: a quasi-Japanese mansion that will never seem properly lived in.
Yet the picture is resistant to so many of cinema's romantic cliches. When it looks as if we're about to get a jarring chase in the spirit of The French Connection, Chandor has the protagonist plod after his charge at a tense trot. Though the film gives in to extreme violence in its closing moments, it works hard (and succeeds) at making the day-to- day minutiae of economic survival seem exciting.
It is, surely, giving nothing away to reveal that A Most Violent Year ultimately resolves itself into yet another retelling of Faust. Shot in such subterranean depths of winter that the characters seem constantly in danger of freezing into moral and literal stasis, the picture confirms that, rather than being sold in job lots, souls tend to be salami-sliced into gradual extinction.
That is how commerce functions. The Godfather fancied itself as the story of America. Chandor's contemporary classic manages to engage with the same myths without ever raising its voice. The Oscars don't deserve it.
