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In which J.C. Chandor goes 70's Sidney Lumet (with a little pinch of The Long Good Friday) for the story of a businessman (Oscar Isaac) and his wife (Jessica Chastain) try to maintain as they seek to expand their heating oil business, while also dealing with the probe of a D.A. (David Oyelowo) who's been keeping tabs on them.
Deals are made, jobs are lost, people get robbed, chases happen, etc. But despite the promise implied in the film's title, this is NOT some "gangster shit." Chastain's character is the daughter of a mobster but that doesn't necessarily factor into the story. Chandor is aiming for Lumet-esque New York grit, and while the mean streets of the city circa 1981 are shot beautifully once again by the great Bradford Young, it's clear that Chandor's more interested in the bleak economics and corruption of the time and the deals that come about and fall through for Isaac's character (Morales) than having him engage in a series of tough guy histrionics for our entertainment. And in case that point is missed, it's reinforced in a couple of scenes involving potential gun play and the Morales family.
Not to say that there isn't any action: I mentioned TLGF because there's also a bit of a mystery regarding who exactly is trying to sabotage Morales' efforts to come up, and the sabotage is in the form of attempted oil truck robberies. Each of these action scenes are brief but are effective in their own right, as they ratchet up the tension and the hope that Morales can get enough bread in order to seal his deal in time.
Isaac and Chastain are very good, and Isaac reminded me of Serpico-era Pacino throughout (but without the beard). His character appears to be a reasonable, rational, straight-up guy, and so it's not hard to want him to succeed in his business, even as the presence of the law is hovering. Oyelewo was fine but I wished there would be more of him. Chastain didn't have as much to play as Isaac, as she mostly dealt with accounting records and sat around and smoked and applied makeup while rocking long nails and fly early 80's wardrobe. But her character has more of a coiled aggression than Isaac's, and so it was interesting to watch that tension between the two of them. Albert Brooks is in this as well, as Isaac's lawyer, and he was okay.
Again, this is not a gangster movie, or even a "crime drama," really. Chandor uses some of the conventions of the gritty 70's thriller to create a treatise on the attempt to come up in an tough economic era. It was cool.
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Niggas made aliases.
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