J.C. Chandor
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The Godfather (1972)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced A Most Violent Year (2014)
Themes Characters
Here, he hones in on one element of New York City criminal life that, at first glance, seems mundane compared to, say, The Godfather, one of the film’s obvious inspirations.
The parallels to mob movies are strong, enhanced by Isaac's occasional channeling of Al Pacino in "The Godfather" films.
Isaac’s performance is initially distracting, channeling too much of the idealistic, young Michael Corleone in The Godfather (not the soulless, monstrous Michael of The Godfather Part II).
Isaac’s performance brings to mind Al Pacino (both in choices and in appearance) in “The Godfather.”
Reviewers have compared Chandor’s film to prime Sidney Lumet, which is bang-on, and Isaac’s quietly commanding performance to Al Pacino’s Michael in The Godfather , partly because Abel too is a man of integrity who’s nevertheless destined to dive into the moral morass with everyone else (actually, rather than Pacino, there are beguilingly odd overtones of Christopher Walken in Isaac’s generally soft-spoken delivery—“We’re on the same side here” becomes, “We’re on the same side?
Played by Oscar Isaac in a watchful, thoughtfully paced performance that recalls Al Pacino in “The Godfather,” Morales is determined to bring personal pride and his own brand of striver’s politesse to the competitive industry he’s adopted: Even when his drivers are brutally hijacked while making their daily runs, he refuses to allow them to arm themselves.
The American director James Gray also has made this kind of sideways homage, channeling the gangster pictures of Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola and the big city thrillers of Sidney Lumet ("Serpico"), with a more meditative pace.
As we go deeper into it, we're reminded of the films of the late Sidney Lumet, the Big Apple's master spinner of cops 'n' robbers tales (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead).
You would think a film entitled “A Most Violent Year” would bring suspense and action to its intriguing premise, but instead it stubbornly insists on slowing things down to the point that you start thinking about similar films, the Sydney Lumet classic, “Serpico,” for example.
J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year is a most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet ( Serpico , Prince of the City ) and Coppola’s Godfather series.
The beautifully lensed ("Selma" DP Bradford Young), atmospheric period movie calls up such Sidney Lumet classics as "Prince of the City" and "Serpico."
Nearly every review of "A Most Violent Year" has mentioned the influence of Sidney Lumet, who captured this era in the Big Apple in films such as "Prince of the City" and "Serpico."
Writer-director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, All is Lost) offers a film stylistically reminiscent of Sidney Lumet, whose great Prince of the City was released in 1981.
It’s particularly reminiscent of Prince of the City and Q&A, two films he made on either end of the 1980s that dealt with crime and corruption in an increasingly grim Gotham — and films that were made in his uniquely invisible and un-showy style.
J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year is a most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet ( Serpico , Prince of the City ) and Coppola’s Godfather series.
The beautifully lensed ("Selma" DP Bradford Young), atmospheric period movie calls up such Sidney Lumet classics as "Prince of the City" and "Serpico."
It’s more like the ’70s-ish films that came after that era — pictures like Sidney Lumet’s “Prince of the City,” which felt generally gritty and grimy but oozed a cooler, less insistent realism.
Nearly every review of "A Most Violent Year" has mentioned the influence of Sidney Lumet, who captured this era in the Big Apple in films such as "Prince of the City" and "Serpico."
At times, such touchstones are too obvious: Chastain's gangster's daughter unmistakeably evokes Michelle Pfeiffer's moll from Scarface.
But with his fuel trucks being hijacked on a daily basis and the DA’s office interested only in investigating his own misdemeanours, Colombian-born Abel Morales (Isaac, channelling Al Pacino in Godfather III more than Scarface ) is struggling to stay on the right side of the law.
Jessica Chastain, on the other hand, gets to have a little more fun as his abrasive wife, Anna, chewing up the delicious scenery with her Brooklyn accent, vintage Armani wardrobes, and neat bangs borrowed undoubtedly from Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface.
That presence is counter-balanced by an equally astounding performance by Jessica Chastain, who at times looks and sounds like Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface.
Some of the most compelling scenes involve Abel and his wife, Anna, played by Jessica Chastain in vintage Armani and with Michelle Pfeiffer ’s hair from “Scarface.”
That idea is Michelle-Pfeiffer-in-“Scarface” as Lady Macbeth.
Cast Away (2000)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
influenced All Is Lost (2013), A Most Violent Year (2014)
Themes Plot
We go for years without a great survival movie a la “Cast Away” or “Touching the Void,” and suddenly we have two at the same time (“Gravity” is the other).
David: Writer/director J.C Chandor's new film about a sailor stranded in the Indian Ocean will inevitably be compared to Tom Hanks' "Cast Away", and to director Ang Lee's brilliant "Life of Pi".
Not even Tom Hanks’s impressive turn as a survivor on an island in Cast Away (2000) counts since his lengthy sojourn as the lone soul on screen is bookended by sequences before and after that feature other characters.
Similarly themed to “Cast Away” or even “Gravity” but not as enthralling as either.
Certainly, the plot will make it easy for some to tag this Life of Pi without the tiger, Cast Away without the volleyball, Gravity without George Clooney.
By offering Redford the sole role in this survivalist-at-sea pic – essentially, a leaner Cast Away (2000; with no landing) for the 77-year-old performer, and a chance to prove he’s still strong onscreen – Chandor had a good pitch for a tough sell.
The Old Man and the Sea (1958)
Directed by John Sturges
influenced All Is Lost (2013)
Characters Plot
Spencer Tracy played a Cuban fisherman in the 1958 The Old Man and the Sea, but he was on land with others at the beginning and the end.
A nerve-wracking reimagining of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, All Is Lost’s grandiose portrait of honour in struggle is a lucid and indomitable celebration of the endurance of the human spirit that makes for one hell of a ride.
Maybe not in the same minimalist style — but, between Castaway , Life of Pi , The Perfect Storm and The Old Man and the Sea (fun fact: Spencer Tracy was 57 when he made that; Redford’s 77), these are familiar waters.
The film is being compared with John Sturges' 1958 adaptation of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, but over the years Sturges' film has become ripe for parody with its booming Dimitri Tiomkin score and a script that has Spencer Tracy holding extended conversations both with himself and the marlin he is trying to catch.
The French Connection (1971)
Directed by William Friedkin
influenced A Most Violent Year (2014)
Visuals
Much like this year’s “The Drop,” Chandor’s character-driven drama owes a lot to the work of Sidney Lumet, although it’s an entirely different 1970s classic (“The French Connection”) that no doubt inspired the excellent chase sequence in the final act, which takes place just as the mounting tension comes to a boil, nearly ruining everything Abel stands for in the process.
A tense freeway shootout and car/foot/rail chase sequence aside (the latter plays like a sombre variation on a theme from The French Connection ), A Most Violent Year keeps its action tinder largely dry, the fireworks generated instead by tense conversations between husbands and wives, lawyers and district attorneys, police and putative thieves.
It invokes “The Godfather Part II” (when Abel protests an attack on the family home) and even “The French Connection” (although this time the chase is on foot).
There’s none of the dynamism present in Joaquin Phoenix’s transformation from a wayward sensualist to an anguished hero cop in the similarly eighties-set We Own the Night, and the foot-chase set-piece lacks the choking terror of the car chase in Gray’s film—the gap between the two is the difference between saluting The French Connection and subsuming it into something distinctive and visionary.
Wall Street (1987)
Directed by Oliver Stone
influenced Margin Call (2011), A Most Violent Year (2014)
Themes
If Margin Call was Chandor’s Wall Street and All is Lost was his Cast Away, then A Most Violent Year is his take on The Godfather or Scarface.
With a score so unobtrusive it might well be speaker hum, and hushed business meetings in barber shops and restaurant backrooms deciding the characters’ fates, AMVY places itself in stark contrast to ’80s films like Scarface and Wall Street , with their acquisitive anti-heroes.
Margin Call (Lionsgate) accomplishes something that Oliver Stone failed to show in his “Wall Street” sequel: it explains how and why the market crash happened, not just in terms of economics but in the culture of Wall Street and the justifications that individuals tell themselves in order to follow the company line.
First-time director Chandor has convinced some interviewers that the film is somehow sympathetic to big business because -- unlike, say, “Wall Street’’ -- it doesn’t end with its protagonists in handcuffs (or by showing the consequences of the crash, as if we all needed to be reminded).
Director J.C. Chandor – whose father was in finance for 40 years – brings some of the same clear-eyed approach to this that Oliver Stone, another stock-market brat, brought to “Wall Street.”
With its cool, deliberate pacing and muted sense of impending doom, "Margin Call" isn't like the showy financial drama "Boiler Room" or Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" movies.
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced A Most Violent Year (2014)
Characters Visuals
His dark features, his concentration, and his formal speech recall (intentionally, I think) Pacino as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather: Part II.”
That coat, too prominent to be considered just a wardrobe accessory, also serves as a movie echo: Al Pacino wore a similar coat in The Godfather: Part II, a gangster’s costume of respectability.
OK, toss back two already: The Corleones also sold oil — olive oil — and the camel-hair coat Abel wears throughout is a dead ringer for the one Al Pacino wore throughout The Godfather: Part II.
David: Writer/director J.C Chandor's new film about a sailor stranded in the Indian Ocean will inevitably be compared to Tom Hanks' "Cast Away", and to director Ang Lee's brilliant "Life of Pi".
Certainly, the plot will make it easy for some to tag this Life of Pi without the tiger, Cast Away without the volleyball, Gravity without George Clooney.
An impressively spare, nearly dialogue-free stranded -at-sea drama that strips characterization down to basic survival instinct, this emotionally resonant one-man showcase for Robert Redford faces a fair number of marketing challenges, given its audacious minimalism and proximity to a much splashier castaway adventure, “Life of Pi.”
The unsentimental tone is refreshing after the mawkishness of Ang Lee's Life of Pi, yet something is missing—a sense of Redford's social position, maybe, or other details that might better individualize him.
And that's without the awe-inspiring special effects of "Gravity" (where Sandra Bullock's character eventually ends up alone while stranded in outer space) or last year's "Life of Pi" (where Suraj Sharma's protagonist got to interact with a "real" tiger on his lifeboat, while flashbacks and present day interludes broke up the "stranded at sea" storyline).
The conception leaves itself open to satire, of course: I half expected Our Man to collide with the kid from “Life of Pi,” or Wilson the soccer ball from “Cast Away,” or be rescued by Tom Hanks from “Captain Phillips.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s hard not to think of Ocean’s Eleven , especially as Isaac recruits his semi-reluctant elite team (Affleck is clearly the Brad Pitt to Isaac’s George Clooney).
“Ocean’s Eleven” meets “Zero Dark Thirty” in the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier,” starring Oscar Isaac and Ben Affleck as special-forces veterans who decide to take their skill set private.
The pieces are there, and they are admittedly familiar; for example, a film like Ocean’s Eleven or even something more comedic like The World’s End may come to mind.
He takes the long view of the impending crisis; to hear this great voice curl around a Network-worthy climactic monologue is almost prize enough to get you past the surfeit of pretty skyline shots and vacant stares out of cab windows.
It also echoes the late Paddy Chayefsky ("Network").
It’s a very generic kind of image, first made famous in the shark’s-eye shots from Jaws.
Although you might not think it from the premise, this is the most compelling tale of nautical peril since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
There were times watching this that I thought I was watching "Jaws".
I suppose some folks will deride the film as 106 minutes of boat repairs, “Jaws” without the shark, “Moby-Dick” without the whale, “The Old Man and the Sea” without the marlin.
If Peter Benchley was able to channel Melville in Jaws (1975), I guess J.C. Chandor, writer and director of All Is Lost, can use Hemingway.
The Long Good Friday (1980)
Directed by John Mackenzie
influenced A Most Violent Year (2014)
Themes Plot
This gripping drama recalls The Long Good Friday - also set in the get-rich-quick years of the early 80s - but unlike Bob Hoskins's brutal gang boss, Morales is an honest, nice guy "taking the path most right".
Imagine a New York version of The Long Good Friday and you’ll have some idea of where the plot is heading.
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Directed by James Foley
influenced A Most Violent Year (2014), Margin Call (2011)
Dialogue Visuals Themes
Gifted with a big, Oscar-bait scene in which Abel methodically explains to a trio of wide-eyed new recruits how to secure new customers—a rewrite of Alec Baldwin’s Glengarry Glen Ross monologue—Isaac finds just the right mix of superciliousness and a true believer’s sincerity— the same combination that buoys his entire performance.
If Chandor’s promising 2011 debut, “Margin Call,” could loosely be described as a Wall Street transposition of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “A Most Violent Year” seems to have been steeped overnight in a solution equal parts Sidney Lumet and Lumet’s consummate latter-day reinterpreter, James Gray.
See James Foley’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Mike Judge’s “Office Space,” or Jason Reitman’s “Up In The Air,” all three very different films but all using the mundane to startling effect.
This is not “Glengarry Glen Ross,” with venal salesman and savage banter.
This is not Glengarry Glen Ross, with venal salesman and savage banter.
I would guess that he has studied David Mamet’s work, digesting the dramatic value of repetition and silence in, say, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” along with the play’s stunned outrage and the characters’ strangely displaced, almost disembodied reactions as some appalling reality swings into view.
Sections of this movie are reminiscent of Gray's "The Yards," which was equal parts " On the Waterfront " and "The Godfather," and his followup, the gangster picture/undercover cop thriller " We Own the Night " (which, like "A Most Violent Year," is fitfully excellent, but sometimes tries too hard to be a K-Tel Greatest '70s Macho Movie Hits album).
The municipal stew is dense and unusually flavorful, of a kinship with James Gray’s The Yards and other films made for the last handful of adults who still go to theaters.
Chandor’s film bears an even stronger likeness, though, to Gray’s little-seen sophomore feature, “The Yards” (2000), which built a similar tale of ambition, free enterprise and moral compromise around an essential Big Apple industry: there, subway parts; here, heating oil.
Based on Michael Lewis's 2010 bestselling book of the same name, McKay's film operates on a gambit as audacious — and as ultimately unsuccessful — as the one that J.C. Chandor risked in Margin Call (2011), which also centers on the economic catastrophe of seven years ago: Both ask viewers not only to empathize with but to find heroic obscenely overpaid finance workers.
“The Big Short” joins and compares favorably to other laud-worthy films about the tanking of the economy or the insane housing market, including the exceptional “Margin Call,” the anger-inducing documentary “Inside Job” and this year’s indie gem “99 Homes.”
Filmmakers looking to rectify this have already approached the story from a number of angles, from sober-minded documentary (“Inside Job”) to operatic boiler-room drama (“Margin Call”), but the route taken by “The Big Short” is by far the most radical, turning a dense economics lecture into a hyper-caffeinated postmodern farce, a spinach smoothie skillfully disguised as junk food.
A number of other films have been set against the financial collapse, including J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011) and Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes (2015), as well as a host of outraged documentaries, but The Big Short does something unique in trying to dramatize the collapse itself and what led to it, rather than using it as a backdrop for character drama.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
influenced A Most Violent Year (2014)
Themes Visuals
As we go deeper into it, we're reminded of the films of the late Sidney Lumet, the Big Apple's master spinner of cops 'n' robbers tales (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead).
It’s an apt enough comparison, although Chandor’s style tends to be less teeming and comprehensive than the approach the late Lumet took in movies such as Serpico, Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon and Q & A.
He’s reflecting on the recent past, but behind the camera, in 2014, his director might be daydreaming about Dog Day Afternoon.
As such, there are no big themes here beyond the "greed is bad" credo we've seen in everything from Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film Greed to recent Wall Street swipes such as Boiler Room (also based on Belfort's life) to Margin Call.
Exposing the nefarious side of the financial industry isn't anything new -- we've seen it in films from "Wall Street" to "Boiler Room" (also inspired by Belfort's story) to "Margin Call" -- but never have the excesses been this excessive.
Still, this bawdy mess of a movie is far preferable to 2011’s stupefyingly adored Margin Call, in which the 2008 financial freak-out is recast as a white-collar weepie.
This type of territory has certainly been covered before in films like 2000’s Boiler Room (also influenced by Belfort’s story) and even 2011’s Margin Call , but never with such gusto and reckless abandonment.
Of course, when one treads the subject of the stock market in a movie, one immediately thinks that ground has been well covered with the likes of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” and its sequel or smaller films like “Margin Call” and “Boiler Room,” but “The Wolf of Wall Street” proves there’s still a lot more stories to tell.
There have been films and TV shows as different as Boiler Room, Margin Call, Arbitrage, Damages, and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, in which a woman's Madoff-like husband ruins her family's life.
At its best, Chandor's film recalls such hard-nosed post-World War II dramas as Jules Dassin's "Thieves' Highway" (trucks, gangsters, trouble), spiced with Lumet's favored brand of New York intrigue.