J.C. Shandor wrote and directed my favorite film of 2011, Margin Call, a verbose, intricate “what if?” financial thriller set before the crash of 2008. Last year, Shandor made the critically acclaimed All is Lost, a tale of survival on the sea starring Robert Redford and featuring a script of a mere 31 pages (it is now on Netflix streaming but I’ve neglected to see it). If there was any doubt, Shandor’s third film cements that he has no interest in doing the same thing again.  A Most Violent Year is the anti-crime picture, a meticulous thriller set in the suburbs of 1981 New York City revolving around the intricacies and corruption of . . . the home heating oil business. Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are a married couple working to expand their reach in the business, in the face of union troubles, a prosecutor’s investigation, the hijacking of their trucks and the intimidation of their sales force. Isaac, an immigrant, is resolute in combating these obstacles in a legal and above-board manner. Chastain is the daughter of a mob boss, and her fealty to the straight-and-narrow is less stringent. As the screws turn, you think you can see where this is going.  You’re wrong.

Chandor’s medium cool meditation emphasizes Isaac’s passion, ethics, and larger vision and while the stakes are small in the scheme of things, to Isaac, they are everything, and Shandor effectively invests the audience in his struggle without infusing the narrative with the expected fleshy, pulpy, satisfying retributive violence. I’ll admit:  bloodletting is what I wanted and expected and as the tension mounted, Chandor’s resolution felt unsatisfying. In that way, Chandor transforms the genre.

This is an ingenious, unique movie.  Chandor’s feel for 80s New York is sharp, his pacing is tight and he never veers far from the heart of the picture, the unswerving devotion of Isaac and Chastain to their business and to each other. Their performances are riveting; they feel like a married couple who melded passionately but never addressed longstanding disputes in their view of the world.  Like a real married couple.

One of the best of the year.

On the plus side, this moody, meditative adaptation of a John le Carre’ novel is intelligent yet explicable (unlike the rushed and byzantine Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and anchored by one of the greatest actors of a generation, the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman. On the downside, while it is compelling in parts, it is hurt by a weak Rachel McAdams performance and an inapt one by Robin Wright.  More problematic, the grim resolution seems a cop-out, an easy resolution that makes the viewer wonder what the hell this was all about.

Hoffman is a German intelligence officer who leads an anti-terror unit in Hamburg. Like Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty, he is haunted by an intelligence failure from his past. He is tracking two terror suspects, one a potential bomber and the other a funder, when he formulates the idea of baiting the latter with the former. McAdams plays a lefty lawyer representing the suspected bomber and, as usual, she is thin, distractingly glamorous and, when asked to buckle under the weight of seclusion and interrogation, inept and unconvincing. Wright, as a CIA counterpart to Hoffman, is merely odd. She’s much too high brow, playing a minor variation of her character in Netflix’s excellent House of Cards, fine for a First Lady but not so much for a spook.

Hoffman, however, is stellar, whether keeping a frightened mole from turning, managing his younger team, or lecturing McAdams on the naivete of her politics. He is supported ably by Willem Dafoe as a banker caught in the middle of Hoffman’s gambit. Dafoe exudes the fear and discomfort of a “civilian” dragged into the high stakes of thwarting terror.  If the film’s end is somewhat ho hum, both actors are more than worth the watch, especially since this was Hoffman’s last finished picture.