Film’s dirty business should be more entertaining

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This article was published 30/01/2015 (4237 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“In five years, the Corleone family will be completely legitimate.”

— Michael Corleone makes a promise to his wife in The Godfather

 

In J.C. Chandor’s quasi-crime movie, capitalist anti-hero Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) constantly recalls Pacino’s reluctant mob boss in the Godfather films. At times, he even sounds like him.

Abel has the same studiously good grooming, the same intensity, the same pride. Pacino said of playing Michael that he imagined him under the light of an interrogation room. Playing Morales, Isaac vibes as a kindred spirit under the same kind of invisible scrutiny.

The difference between the two characters is that Abel Morales is not cynical in claiming his dream of legitimacy. He’s in a dirty business, selling heating oil and equipment in a highly competitive, highly corrupt New York market. But he aspires to something greater, building an empire for himself with the acquisition of a riverfront fuel depot in Queens, even if his company’s business practices are, shall we say, sketchy.

The year is 1981, a time of nearly unprecedented violent crime in New York and its surrounding boroughs. Abel’s competitors are not as observant of the rules of business.

In fact, one or more of them has taken to hijacking Abel’s trucks at gunpoint and draining the fuel, a costly expense for Abel at a particularly difficult time.

He has 10 days to scrape up the money to pay for the depot for the owners. A union boss is demanding his drivers be allowed to illegally carry pistols to defend themselves against hijackers. A crusading district attorney (David Oyelowo) has targeted Abel in an investigation of his business, and is not above crashing his daughter’s birthday party to search for evidence.

Finally, Abel’s wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), herself the daughter of an organized-crime boss, is not so much a Kay Corleone as a Lady Macbeth, counselling her husband to resort to the same street-fighting ethos as his competitors.

Writer-director J.C. Chandor memorably examined the blurry borders of business and criminality in his excellent 2011 debut feature Margin Call, a fictional but fairly accurate depiction of the corporate grand larceny going on behind the scenes of the 2008 financial meltdown.

He returns to that theme here, building extraordinary tension from an interesting dynamic: We moviegoers are conditioned to expect Abel’s story to transmogrify into a violent revenge tale, as per the title, leading to a conclusion in which Abel will settle his accounts in the manner of Michael Corleone in the baptism scene of The Godfather, and perhaps using Michael’s oft-repeated justification: “It’s strictly business.”

That scene doesn’t happen, exactly. The human cost of unfettered capitalism is depicted in a subplot in which a driver, returning to work after being robbed and beaten, turns fugitive after an expressway shootout.

While Isaac has a certain dark gravitas as Abel, the movie’s chief asset is Chastain, here to fiercely turn the “supportive wife” character on its ear. Far from being a demure helpmate, Anna loves the game. She’ll provocatively dress as arm candy when Abel is obliged to take some bankers to dinner, but when their car strikes a deer on the way home, she’ll take charge of dealing with the mortally wounded animal with the cold-blooded dispatch of a seasoned assassin.

The problem with the overall film is that, aside from Chastain, it’s not exactly entertaining.

That may seem a petty quibble, given Chandor’s serious intent, but it’s an important distinction anyway. Where Abel’s collection of crises should induce mounting suspense, the feelings aroused are more akin to sheer stress. Watching the movie is like a prolonged wait in a dentists’s office for a root canal.

Bradford Young’s cinematography doesn’t help. Young employs lots of natural/available light to strike a realistic tone, but much of the film looks simply muddy and underlit.

Chandor’s crime movie would have placed him in the realm of Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese, except he lacks something those two directors have in spades: the gift of showmanship.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca