A Most Violent Year review: plucky Oscars outsider draws blood

In the winter of 1981, with snow swirling and the crime-rate soaring, New York needs someone to help keep out the chill. Cometh the crisis, cometh Abel Morales and his heating oil business. Morales is an immigrant upstart with his eye on the prize; a sharp-suited salesman chasing the American dream. His future’s so bright it’s about to burst into flames.

A Most Violent Year, fittingly enough, comes billed as the plucky outsider in the pending Oscar race, a film on a mission to unseat the big favourites. Like Morales, the odds are stacked against it. And yet, like Morales, JC Chandor’s period crime drama is rigorous, resourceful and as smart as a whip. It surely can’t win; it’s too nuanced and sombre. But its canny tactical struggle remains a joy to behold.

Beset by disaster, Morales turns to his steely wife (Jessica Chastain, a shade underused) and Albert Brooks’s world-weary old mentor, who sags like a cloth cat with the stuffing come out. But the man is being outnumbered, outmanoeuvered. Around the table at the local restaurant, the other power suppliers sit in comfortable clover. Any one of these bosses could be stealing his oil; they all stand to benefit. “Just stop,” Morales implores them. “Have some pride in what you do.” He’d dearly like to take the high road, but he’s being dragged right through the slime.

Just who is Abel Morales and what function does he serve? Many may view him as a noble crusader, others as some silver-tongued chancer who blundered out of his depth. But the truth, perhaps, is more thorny and troublesome than that. Implicitly, Chandor’s film invites us to regard the oil supplier as the perfect hero for New York’s imperfect 1980s; the ambitious pioneer from a time when the place was in freefall. The following years will see the rise of Wall Street, the deregulation of the banks and the resurgence of Manhattan as a millionaire’s playground. But the first order of business is to get the power back on. So Morales holds his nose, cuts some corners and sends his trucks across the bridge. He provides the fuel for Reagan’s shining city on the hill.