Like Frank Sinatra in his famous song, the hero of this severe and sinewy drama-thriller likes weighing up the years. 1975 was a very good year. Other years, such as 1971 and 1979, glimpsed on the sides of cardboard boxes filled with dodgy paperwork and crooked accounting, not so much. And 1981, the year in which the movie takes place, is the toughest of all. This is when smart and ambitious businessman Abel Morales is to make his move into the big time, decisively upping his game in the New York heating oil distribution business. Director JC Chandor allows us to savour this asset’s metaphorical properties: murky, pricey, inflammable.
This film-maker is taking his cue from Coppola, De Palma and Scorsese with their immigrants upwardly mobile within a gangland version of the American dream, inhabiting a violent world, warily and woundedly aware of the ethnic pecking order. When the exasperated Abel says, “I spent my whole life trying not to become a gangster”‚ it is almost a conscious inversion of the opening line of Goodfellas. And like Paul Thomas Anderson in another context, Chandor reminds us that where there is oil, there will be blood.
Abel has an intense, almost historic sense of the step he’s taking to enlarge and detoxify his business: to create a legitimate commercial empire out of the crooked small-time setup he inherited from his wiseguy father-in-law. He will put down a huge cash deposit on a strategically crucial waterfront property from which he can outflank his scary rivals. He then has 30 tense days to close the deal or lose everything, a period in which he must persuade the bank to lend him the balance, convince the district attorney that his business is not corrupt, and defend his employees and family against brutal attacks from predatory gangster-competitors whose dumb, violent world he is trying to outgrow.
Oscar Isaac is smoothly formidable as Abel, razor-sharp in a double-breasted suit and mustard-coloured topcoat, a man whose confident manners announce that he has evolved away from the racketeering that gave him his start, but not as far away as all that. Like Alec Baldwin’s icy salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross, Abel believes in the importance of always closing, of fixing potential customers with a fearless gaze. He reminds his Spanish-speaking employees that he will converse only in English: it is a status thing.
As his wife Anna, Jessica Chastain has a decent supporting role which she plays to the hilt: much better than the boring spouse parts that Sienna Miller has been landed with lately. She is the fierce, goading, sexy Lady Macbeth, hysterically contemptuous of Abel’s insistence that her dad’s dirty money had nothing to do with their current success, and furious with Abel for trying to stay legal in their imminent turf war: his job is to persuade her that his problem with violence isn’t that it’s wrong but that it’s stupid and shortsighted.
With her push-up bra and talon-like fingernails, Chastain’s Anna is a Mob princess who never entirely accepted commoner status among the mercantile classes. She is on the verge of period caricature (as in David O Russell’s American Hustle) but has a sharp, shrewd scene as she attempts to bully and intimidate David Oyelowo’s DA as his officers search her house, and a sensational moment with a gun. Alongside these fierce lovers and warrior comrades, Albert Brooks intelligently plays Andrew, the ageing, hangdog consigliere.
Just as Abel straddles the worlds of crime and respectable business, so Chandor’s movie has one foot in the genre of organised crime and another in the city drama of family loyalty and political grime: the tough film-making of James Gray and Sidney Lumet (and before them, Elia Kazan). Bradford Young’s cinematography shows a steely, gritty palette of greys and browns and the shootout-chase scene Chandor and Young create on the Queensboro Bridge is terrific.
Just as New York City is at its pivotal moment in 1981, beginning its long march away from its reputation for inner-city lawlessness and towards the much mythologised “tipping point” of metropolitan corporate respectability, so Abel is the prosperous butterfly struggling to escape the grub of violent crime. It is a painful, dangerous, compromised process. JC Chandor depicts it with flair, though with a touch of sentimental melodrama at the very end. The final gunshot is very operatic. There is blood, oil – and tears.
