Volker Schlöndorff
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Connections, in both directions
Part of the story brings to mind The Handmaid's Tale and another part echoes some of the themes in La Zona , a hard-hitting Mexican film about the violence that erupts between the haves and the have-nots when the poor are given the shaft in order to protect the privileges of the rich and the powerful.
What should be a taut thriller stretches into an overextended slog with periodic scolding lectures, an exercise in metaphor akin to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but with far less faith in its audience.
And it reminds me, too, of The Handmaid’s Tale — The Purge is to American attitudes about violence and public safety what that other film was to the nation’s attitudes about women’s sexuality.
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
influenced by Death of a Salesman (1985)
Themes
Yet the most surreal segment of the production is the incredibly massive city-size theatrical extravaganza Caden undertakes after obtaining a MacArthur grant for his enormous success with a rejuvenated reworking of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman cast entirely with young people.
The title is both a term meaning a part that is used to refer to the whole, or vice versa, as well as a wordplay on the upstate city of Schenectady, where Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is staging an avant-garde production of "Death of a Salesman."
Caden is currently putting on a revisionist play of "Death of a Salesman," casting young twenty-somethings in much older roles as a way of telling the audience that these actors, too, will end up alone and gasping their last breath like the characters they are portraying.
Not so poignant as "Death of a Salesman," to which it's often compared, the drama really has more in common with Barry Levinson's "Tin Men."
The piece itself is a modern classic: Mamet's revisiting of the themes of Death of a Salesman with the added disillusionment of the 1980s and enough profanity to choke a motherfucker.
The Other Lamb (2020)
Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska
influenced by The Handmaid's Tale (1990)
Themes
Australian writer Catherine S McMullen’s screenplay featured on the 2017 Black List and Blood List, and seems to owe some debt of inspiration to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale .
The cult resides in a remote countryside location, and the depiction of the women’s everyday lives clearly takes inspiration from the world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Elements of Hotel life closely recall Margaret Atwood's similarly ruthless allegorical novel The Handmaid's Tale: masturbation is prohibited, with a hideous punishment for disobedience.
Oh sure, there have been a couple of examples of this particular brand of filmmaking that I have admired—John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory” and Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” (especially its astounding first hour or so) immediately spring to mind—but those hardly begin to make up for such utter grotesqueries as “The Tin Drum,” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” and, of course, the more-appalling-than-ever “Life is Beautiful,” films that take the most horrific event of the 20th century and attempt to milk it for cheap sentiment and, hopefully, Oscar nominations from people who mistakenly assume that just because a movie involves a serious subject like the Holocaust, it must be serious as well and therefore worthy of consideration.
Somehow Waititi mongrelizes Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum and then fails the critique of idol-worship that made Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere — with its full-out correction of Mussolini’s impact on the romantic imagination of a subjected populace — a perfect allegory for Obama-era idolatry.
“A Most Violent Year” makes an unlikely cross of the early works of David Mamet with the gangster sagas of Lumet, Coppola and Scorsese with even a hint of Arthur Miller in his “Death of a Salesman” mode thrown in.
Like “Death of a Salesman,” “A Most Violent Year” portrays a passionate man trapped between personal and professional obligations.
Patricia Rozema’s loose adaptation of Jean Hegland’s 1998 novel—the original evoking Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with a touch of Orwell—is set in the forest of Northern California (in the unspecified near-future), where the siblings (in their late teens and early 20s, respectively) are living with their widowed father (Callum Keith Rennie) in a well-appointed country cabin.
Death of a Salesman it is not.
Parts "Death of a Salesman," "On the Road," and "Bonnie and Clyde" — with a pinch of "Glengarry Glen Ross" thrown in — this film feels completely of the moment and also classic.
There is a cost, of course, and one that's similar to the dictatorial state Margaret Atwood imagined in The Handmaid's Tale.
Garfield, so good in The Social Network and onstage in Death of a Salesman, puts his own stamp on Peter and his drive to solve the mystery of his parents' death.
It so happens that Andrew Garfield, the new Spider-Man, played Biff to Hoffman’s Willy in Mike Nichols’ Death of a Salesman this spring and got great notices.
It’s higher quality fare than many other recent tentpole franchise offerings thanks to the class struggles, Dystopian outlook, and the brutality of the concept but there’s nothing here than elevates the film from being more than a smash-up of The Handmaid’s Tale, Logan’s Run, and The Running Man skewed to the teen marketplace.
That quest suggests “Mean Streets” by way of Preston Sturges, with a touch of “Death of a Salesman” to boot — a mesmerizing chronicle of desperate schemes, and it’s hard to imagine anyone but Sandler at the center of it.
There are touches here of Dorian Gray, Benjamin Button, “The Tin Drum,” Orlando and even a bit of X-Men.
And Kranz, now on Broadway in Death of a Salesman, is comic dynamite as the pothead.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
influenced by Death of a Salesman (1985)
Visuals
Trench-coat trudging, briefcase-carrying Gary Oldman, as John le Carre's Cold War-era British agent George Smiley, looks like he's on his way to the "Death of a Salesman" auditions.
Director Mike Newell has likened this story to Death of a Salesman and its an apt comparison.
He regroups quickly, though, and propelled by extraordinary performances by Al Pacino and Johnny Depp and a fine supporting cast creates a brooding, funny, horrific frieze of thwarted loyalty, love, and ambition -- a gangster version of Death of a Salesman.
In the face of more than a century and a half of such malignant propaganda, terrifying social thriller “Antebellum” lands like an explosive mortar — a potent, politically charged cross between “The Handmaid’s Tale” and an M. Night Shyamalan movie, wherein a successful Black woman (Janelle Monáe) is punished for challenging authority by being forced back into bondage.
Think The Handmaid’s Tale by way of David Cronenberg.
As a warning about the bad things that can happen when we grow lazy about our liberties, “The Circle” is unfortunately up against “The Handmaid’s Tale” — a much more topical nightmare for our uneasy age.