'Most Violent Year' a gritty good time

BEHIND every great fortune lies a crime.

So wrote Honore de Balzac, who did not run a home heating-oil business in Jersey in 1981, but whose ideas are highly relevant to men who do in "A Most Violent Year," a look at sharp-elbowed, unglamorous capitalism from writer/director J.C. Chandor.

The film stars Oscar Isaac as Abel Morales, a striving Latino immigrant - driver turned manager turned guy who's now married to the daughter (Jessica Chastain) of the owner, now retired.

Abel runs the shop, mostly behind the wheel of a Cadillac that's as long as Manhattan, though his business is just across the river in North Jersey, where rivals guard territory with bare knuckles and pistol butts.

Abel tries to avoid the strong-arm stuff and wants to run a relatively clean operation. When choosing among business strategies, he says he likes to choose the one that is "most good," by which he means least illegal.

It works for him, maybe too well. Competitors don't like the way his drive and success are crowding them out. They're attacking his drivers, beating his salesmen and finking him to a local district attorney (David Oyelowo).

All this as Abel is seeking bank loans for a high-risk/ high-reward investment in a facility that will make him top dog by a wide margin. He has just a few days to round up permanent financing or he loses everything. The wolves are circling.

There are few chases and gunshots in "A Most Violent Year," but what makes the movie interesting is its hard-boiled (and, one suspects, realistic) look at the realities of making a profit in a rough-and-tumble business.

Abel isn't being cute when he says he looks for the least bad option. He keeps a set of relatively clean books. He's mostly good, and you can see how much it means to him to provide jobs and opportunity to younger guys who remind him of himself.

When assaults by rivals escalate, and his combative wife threatens to bring in her (mob-connected) father, Abel says no. He's determined to do things his way. The least bad way.

Can he?

Chandor wrings a decent amount of suspense out of it. "A Most Violent Year," though shut out of the Oscars, got the National Board of Review's Best Film of 2014 award.

I don't know that it hits that level. The movie seems in need of a tighter edit, and its languid pace and smoky, color-drained look make it feel overlong.

But it's worth sticking around till the end, when Chandor springs a bitterly amusing twist, wrapped in dialogue that's as good on the subject of money as anything I've heard in recent years.

Just as amusingly cynical is the banter, in the closing moments, between Abel and the D.A., a man always looking to back the right horse.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship?

It's 1981, when business and those charged with policing business started getting chummy. Looming in the background is Manhattan, where Gordon Gekko has just bought his first pair of suspenders.