A Most Violent Year - review: 'Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain demonstrate the sexual tension and rivalry between a husband and wife looking to make it big'

The heat is on in this crime thriller set in Eighties New York and starring Oscar Isaac as a first-generation immigrant looking to expand his business
A Most Violent Year: Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain play husband and wife team Abel and Anna Morales
Charlotte O'Sullivan29 January 2015

Most American movies about corruption revolve around youngsters disgusted by Mob-controlled wheeler-dealing (The Yards, City Hall). Or cynical anti-heroes who, faced with moral filth, roll their sleeves up and get stuck in (The Godfather trilogy, Scarface, Goodfellas, Casino). Abel Morales, the protagonist of J C Chandor’s period crime thriller, hovers somewhere in between: he wants to be clean; he's not that clean.

We meet Abel (Oscar Isaac) at a crucial point in his fortunes. A first-generation immigrant in Eighties New York, he’s trying to expand his heating-oil business, even as his trucks are robbed by mysterious goons and he’s being investigated by the DA. His ambition could take he and Brooklyn-born wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) into a new league of wealth. Or it could destroy their empire.

Isaac is full of surprises. In the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, he played guitar and sang for real. Here, he breaks into Spanish — he’s half-Guatemalan, half-Cuban, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. It works beautifully, conveying instantly that this is a man with multiple selves.

It becomes clear, too, that Abel owes virtually everything to Anna. Isaac and Chastain do a fine job of showing the rivalry, as well as the sexual tension, between this pair. Sometimes they seem more like incestuous siblings than husband and wife.

Bradford Young’s cinematography is awesome, transforming bleak wastelands and mansions into visions of light. It’s as if we’re seeing everything through the eyes of Morales, to whom America is beauty incarnate.

If there’s a flaw it’s that Chandor — in order to provide a more complex portrait of criminality and withhold titillating violence — downplays the brutality of free enterprise. Morales, and the men he does business with, wind up smelling almost sweet.

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