Stephen Gaghan
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Connections, in both directions
Though Gaghan cites Costa-Gavras's “Z” and American political films of the 1970s as sources of inspiration, his film is very different.
Fiercely partisan political thrillers have generally been the province of great incendiary European directors like Costa-Gavras ("Z") and Gillo Pontecorvo ("Battle of Algiers").
Gold plays like a metallurgical spin on The Big Short, spelling out mining concepts to anyone so amused.
The combination of financial derring-do and the myth of the self-made American millionaire is in the spirit of recent films like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street.
And there are flickering reminders of other ambitious, money-chasing mock epics, as if the filmmakers were hoping an algorithm would deposit “Gold” in the queues of viewers who liked “American Hustle,” “The Big Short” and Mr. Gaghan’s own “Syriana.”
Most directly descended from The Wolf of Wall Street , with thematic echoes of American Hustle and a dash of the capitalism-run-amok of The Big Short thrown in for good measure, Gold falters not only due to the oversaturation of its premise but also from heavy-handed pacing, dull characters and adherence to tropes over dramatic depth—problems which can’t be disguised by slapping a bald cap and some crooked teeth on a slightly pot-bellied Matthew McConaughey.
The narrative combines avarice, naiveté, corporate throat-slitting, and betrayal in ways that claim thematic kinship with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and (more recently) The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short .
Loosely inspired by real events, Stephen Gaghan’s ( Syriana ) satirical drama Gold plays like some sort of bug-eyed, whiskey-swilling love child of The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short .
Members of the production have compared it to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross , and to a couple of John Huston classics: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Man Who Would Be King .
Gaghan’s functional direction always seems just short of a perceived “American Hustle” meets “Glengarry Glen Ross” goal: peppy but never exhilarating about its office scenes, honest about the harshness of its jungle sequence but hardly evocative, and regarding McConaughey’s natural showiness, less an ally than an enabler.
With reverberations of no less than The Treasure of Sierra Madre , Death of a Salesman and even Glengarry Glen Ross , the story has McConaughey at the center as the ever-energetic Kenny Wells, toiling for his dad’s respectable mining company in Reno.
The film hangs on McConaughey's charisma like an old, yellowing suit, but is a reasonably enjoyable blend of Martin Scorsese's wild "The Wolf of Wall Street" and Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo," even down to the record player spinning in the middle of a remote jungle.
Directed by Stephen Gaghan (Syriana), Gold cannot help but be compared to Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that more successfully sought Oscar “gold” by looking at the precipitous rise and fall of a businessman and related stock values.
The combination of financial derring-do and the myth of the self-made American millionaire is in the spirit of recent films like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Most directly descended from The Wolf of Wall Street , with thematic echoes of American Hustle and a dash of the capitalism-run-amok of The Big Short thrown in for good measure, Gold falters not only due to the oversaturation of its premise but also from heavy-handed pacing, dull characters and adherence to tropes over dramatic depth—problems which can’t be disguised by slapping a bald cap and some crooked teeth on a slightly pot-bellied Matthew McConaughey.
I'm not sure why a similarly greedy, insistent, often repugnant protagonist didn't completely turn me off in " The Wolf of Wall Street "—maybe Leonardo DiCaprio is a better match for his character than McConaughey, a " Wolf " bit player, is for Kenny, or maybe Scorsese is just a more imaginative and varied director than Gaghan.
The narrative combines avarice, naiveté, corporate throat-slitting, and betrayal in ways that claim thematic kinship with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and (more recently) The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short .
It reminds me of George Miller, who went from creating the post-apocalyptic Mad Max series to pulling a filmmaking 180 degrees when he co-wrote another talking animal movie, Babe .
Talking animals work much better if you slow things down like “Babe” (1995) or dub voices over real animals like “Homeward Bound” (1993).
He has alternated parts in projects like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" "Intolerable Cruelty," and the three "Ocean's" movies with "The Perfect Storm," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Syriana," "The Good German," and the 2007 film we're discussing here, "Michael Clayton," which may his best starring vehicle to date.
Clooney, eschewing the glib, glamorous persona of the "Ocean's" movies and other slick bonbons, is in baggy-eyed "Syriana" mode here, moving through the days-long 3 a.m. of the soul with none of the cocky affectations that he often relies on.
In that regard, Michael Clayton somewhat resembles Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), with its bleak portrait of an utterly hopeless situation, but this film never quite reaches that level.
Clooney je u ovom filmu bolji nego u nekim svojim ranijim i razvikanijim politički angažiranim filmovima ("Laku noć i sretno", "Syriana"), ali je još daleko od ostvarenja koje bi se uistinu moglo nazvati velikim.
But in “Syriana” and now in “Michael Clayton” he has done something more interesting: he’s playing clever guys who lack the killer instinct, who have some strain of personal honor that holds them back from simply winning.
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Directed by Sydney Pollack
influenced Syriana (2005)
Characters Themes
Clooney plays an updated role of the CIA agents and investigators that Robert Redford and Warren Beatty had played in the conspiracy films of the 1970s, such as “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.”
As important now as "Three Days of the Condor" or "The Manchurian Candidate" were in their time, "Syriana" does for the oil industry what "Traffic" did for the drug trade.
A lot of Altman films like " Nashville " and " Short Cuts " use the technique.
But unlike films such as "Shortcuts" and "Nashville," "Syriana" engages in so much complexity and so much depth that to fully comprehend the plot, you may need a master's in political science.
“Syriana” was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan , who won an Oscar for best screenplay adaptation for “Traffic,” another hyperlink movie.
Mr. Gaghan wrote the screenplay for Mr. Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), about the cross-border drug trade between the United States and Mexico, a more amenable subject for multi-character intrigues than the global miasma of Syriana.
From writer/director Steven Gaghan, the Academy Award winning writer of "Traffic," "Syriana" pushes the boundaries of political correctness.
Writer/director Stephen Gaghan returns to familiar waters with "Syriana," a complex geopolitical quilt of stories and characters that aims to do for oil what his Oscar-winning "Traffic" script did for narcotics.
The first-time director’s approach is nothing new, especially if you’ve seen Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” for which Gaghan received a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
Gaghan's script has, mostly, even greater courage in its convictions than his fine, Oscar-winning template for Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, but as a director, he lacks Soderbergh's ability to blend quotidian impressions with dramatic turning-points, so that we have a closer sense of how every level of life is a node within this system.
Kenny’s hubris — he persists in his belief that the next big find is out there, even after his family prospecting firm is about to go under, and he’s running the business from a bar — is a prominent theme of the film, which was directed by Academy Award-winning “Traffic” screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, from a screenplay by “Friday Night Lights” writers Patrick Massett and John Zinman.
Crisply written by Friday Night Lights screenwriters Patrick Massett and John Zinman, Gold is based on a real-life 1990s stock-market swindle emanating from Calgary, Canada, which the filmmakers have rerouted to a sexier, more tawdry Reno, Nevada.
Though the ‘actual events’ in question (Canada’s Bre-X mining scandal) took place in the 90s, the film, written by Patrick Massett and John Zinman (known for their work on TV series including The Blacklist and Friday Night Lights ), shifts the action to the more go-go 80s.
Writers Patrick Massett and John Zinman (TV’s Friday Night Lights) likely pitched it as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets The Wolf of Wall Street.
The movie sometimes feels like "Zero Dark Thirty" and has a title (which in Jerusalem refers to a person hunting Roman invaders and means "hit man" in Mexico) that sounds like "Syriana," but "Sicario" is simpler than both of those—thankfully, to an extent, as how many people can actually explain all of "Syriana"?
Though the story and the bleak tone recall movies like Zero Dark Thirty , Traffic , and Syriana , the film has a look and feel all its own.
It’s the “Syriana” of drug war movies.
The Sons of Anarchy star has penned a remarkable screenplay worthy of comparisons to the likes of Stephen Gaghan ( Traffic , Syriana ).
Clooney plays an updated role of the CIA agents and investigators that Robert Redford and Warren Beatty had played in the conspiracy films of the 1970s, such as “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.”
First, a beautiful and stylish woman named Suha (Lubna Azabal) walks nervously through a West Bank border patrol, in a scene directly reminiscent of those overplayed checkpoint melodramas in Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention , the last Palestinian drama that provoked me about equally in good and bad directions.
If the film is to be compared to anything outside of Iñárritu's filmography, it might more profitably be compared to Stephen Gaghan's Syriana (2005), which it more resembles.
His interlocking structure and sociopolitical agenda recall films like Traffic and Syriana, but where the Soderbergh touch is supercool, Inarritu’s movies are sweaty from exertion.
Anyone who appreciates the intricate work of Steven Gaghan (“Traffic,” “Syriana”) or last year’s “Crash” should find enough strong moments in at least two or three of the individual stories to keep them riveted, but they’ll find even more depth in the way the stories are layered to give the viewer many options on how the puzzle can be assembled and what it all means once it’s done.
In fact, his episodic ode on ironic connections in a world of increasing mobility builds on the foundation of "Syriana" but is more a chain than a tower.
“Babel” will undoubtedly draw comparisons to “ Crash ,” what with its connect-the-dots storytelling and in-your-face social commentary, but the film is actually a lot more like last year’s politically-charged globetrotter, “ Syriana .”
The storytelling in Syriana is as murky as in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), except that there's more at stake here, e.g., the audience's belief in the good faith of the American government.
The film's structure, though hardly as radical as some have suggested (comparisons to Tarantino's Pulp Fiction are inapt, since elaborate time shifts are not part of the concept), is unusual in that it presents the viewer with a number of stories unfolding at the same time.
A lot of Altman films like " Nashville " and " Short Cuts " use the technique.
But unlike films such as "Shortcuts" and "Nashville," "Syriana" engages in so much complexity and so much depth that to fully comprehend the plot, you may need a master's in political science.
It's like a combination of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, MacGyver, Syriana, and Rambo.
Maybe if someone had hired someone other than Jonathan Lemkin (his last credit was the dismal Red Planet in 2000) to write the thing ... but they didn’t, so instead of the kind of “Syriana (2005) with explosions” that director Antoine Fuqua possibly envisioned, we get a pretentious Rambo movie with superior acting.
I believe that much of Oliver Stone's JFK is well constructed fiction, but that doesn't prevent it from being compelling and a source of endless speculation and interest.
The frenetic pace makes you feel Stoned, as in director Oliver, who might applaud the film's sensory assault to the region of the brain that induces drool over intrigue and background dealings in the manner of "JFK."
Wright proves his chameleon-like ability in a role that is as far away from his "Basquiat" debut or "Shaft's" Peoples Hernandez as is possible to travel.