Movie without Heroes: A Most Violent Year

A Most Violent Year kept me watching first shot to last, which says something - it's a well-paced picture about tough, competitive, corrupt guys in the heating-oil business in NYC in the early '80s. Funny to think of an 80s-set film as a period piece, but I guess it is, and director J.C. Chandor captures the look and feel of the era - not just oversized cars (a subtle comment on the cost of heating oil, in fact) but the derelict buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront, the graffiti everywhere, the very realistic re-creation of a 1980s graffiti-marked subway, a cool sequence in which a car chases a hijacked oil truck along train tracks and through abandoned tunnels. That said, there are many gaping holes in the story: Story involves suave and dapper heating-oil dealer Morales (Oscar Isaac) whose trucks are being hijacked and who's also being investigated by Brooklyn DA as part of review of corruption in the industry. The first third or more of the movie makes us think that Isaac is a corrupt gangster who's engaged in a territory war with rival dealers - the iconography, everything from his look, his straight-man lawyer, his platinum wife, his ugly new McMansion, and most of all the way he behaves when making a deal for some property he wants to buy - make him look and seem like a gangster. Gradually (spoilers coming) we learn that he's not corrupt, in fact he's the only honest guy in the industry, although his wife (Jessica Chastain) has been cooking the books and skimming, unbeknownst to him (or so he says - although it makes no sense that he helps her hide records from the DA). Similarly, it makes no sense that the whole story hinges on his refusal to arm his delivery drivers - I can see that he wouldn't want them to carry guns for self-defense but he certainly would have provided them some security. Also never clear why all the dealers in NYC are picking off only his trucks - do they want to drive him out of business? Why? That's not how it's done - just keep him out of their territory. Overall, the problem is that heating wars seems a pretty thin topic and, most of all, there's nobody for us to root for in this movie: not that the protagonist has to be a crusader for justice, although that might help, but we should like him and feel for him esp when his family's under attack and we just don't or I didn't. By the time the movie shifts gears and begins to show him as a hero fighting for justice, it was way too late. And by the way I don't think a bullet from a handgun would pierce an oil-storage tank, just saying.