‘A Most Violent Year’ lives up to its name

It’s the prestige film the awards season forgot.

“A Most Violent Year,” the latest from buzzed-about writer-director J.C. Chandor (“Margin Call,” “All Is Lost”), is blessed with stirring, sit-up-and-take-notice performances by Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. But aside from the National Board of Review, which gave the film its top prize while honoring those performances, their efforts were largely overlooked.

It’s not hard to see how they got lost in the shuffle. “A Most Violent Year” is a marketing nightmare.

The story of an immigrant’s struggle to maintain his integrity in the shockingly brutal world of home heating oil sales in 1981 New York? P.T. Barnum in his heyday would have had trouble getting the masses excited about that.

It’s easily the least sexy offering in a season that includes having to watch a young Stephen Hawking be painfully and horrifyingly struck down by ALS.

Still, “A Most Violent Year” proves surprisingly compelling, and it wastes little time living up to its name.

Right off the bat, two armed goons pistol whip a Standard Heating Oil driver (Elyes Gabel, CBS’ “Scorpion”) in broad daylight, mere feet from a tollbooth, before stealing his truck and its cargo and leaving him crumpled on the highway with a broken jaw and a limp.

One of the company’s salesmen is beaten and abducted, and trucks are being picked off at an alarming rate, leading to an awkward, inept shootout on the 59th Street Bridge that proves the perpetrators aren’t exactly criminal masterminds. They’re just regular, easily winded Joes trying to eke out a living.

But when Standard’s owner, Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), chases a gunman off the porch of his new eyesore of a mansion in Westchester, it awakens the wrath of his wife, Anna (Chastain). The daughter of the Brooklyn gangster who sold him the business, Anna insists Abel (pronounced Uh-bell) handle the situation soon, warning him of the consequences: “You’re not gonna like what’ll happen once I get involved.”

In many ways, “A Most Violent Year” feels like a mafia movie without the mafia, a point driven home by the turf wars and Abel’s assembling of the “families” of the heating oil business.

The story’s impetus is Abel’s pending acquisition of a bayfront terminal that will allow him to control his fate as he seeks to become a major player.

The culmination of five years of planning with his lawyer (a low-key Albert Brooks), the deal required him to hand over a 40 percent down payment equal to his life’s savings. Abel has 30 days to close or he forfeits the deposit and the terminal will be sold to a competitor. When the escalating violence and the probe into his finances by an ambitious assistant district attorney (“Selma’s” David Oyelowo) cause his bank to pull its backing, Abel has less than a week to cobble together the remaining $1.5 million.

But while this predicament tests Abel’s resolve — “I’ve spent my whole life trying not to become a gangster,” he laments — his scrambling proves less interesting than his relationship with Anna. They’re both strong-willed, ambitious hustlers; she’s just less encumbered by the law. And although they clearly love each other, you could easily see either of them instigating a murder-suicide.

When Abel asks about their company’s exposure in the ongoing investigation, bookkeeper Anna is less than reassuring. “We follow standard industry practice on every front.”

Uh oh.

Abel later asks her whether a certain portion of the company’s money is clean. Anna’s response: “I don’t know what that means.”

Yikes!

Isaac is terrific as Abel, perfectly capturing the character’s weariness and disgust at the surrounding world, as well as his desire to remain a good man in a bad business. He’s a true acting chameleon, giving off zero signs that you’re watching the same man who played the shiftless titular folk singer from the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

And Chastain is a powerhouse in one of the year’s best female performances. Call it blasphemy, but she was certainly better than best supporting actress mainstay Meryl Streep’s work in “Into the Woods.” (Heck, Emily Blunt, Anna Kendrick and even Lilla Crawford as Little Red Riding Hood were better in “Into the Woods,” but that’s another story.)

If they keep improving like this, in a few years Isaac and Chastain — as well as Chandor, who keeps gaining confidence as a filmmaker — will be impossible to ignore.

Even if they decide to collaborate on a similarly difficult sell. Like “Phone Book: The Movie.” Or “A Brief History of Yarn.”

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567.