New York is an essential part of the Marvel brand. Most of the iconic heroes have their stories set on The Big Apple. But, since the first Avengers movie, the city has not been a part of the films like before, except for Spider-Man: Homecoming's opening. The major reason for that choice is to avoid the question "How many civilians are dying at this scene?" that audiences seem to care about since the backlash of Man of Steel and its Dragon Ball Z-type of climax. So, the solution is to take the action scenes to places more isolated from the city.
By ignoring civilian life above the heroes' own ecosystem, New York is just another city for most of the MCU's almost 20 years run. This absence of non-civilian appearances started to alienate the heroes from the world itself, feeling like they live in a different dimension than ordinary people. It must be said that Avengers: Endgame and other films try to address the civilian impact of those battles on real people, yet it does not sustain more than a brief first act commentary.
On the other hand, Netflix's Marvel shows got New York. Between the yuppie sides from Jessica Jones, the obscure in Daredevil, highlighting Harlem in Luke Cage, and the chaotic Chinatown of Iron Fist, they each have distinguishing visual codes that made the show's identity. For a true return to New York as Daredevil heads to Disney+, one director name that must be on the list is James Gray.
Who is James Gray?
James Gray's first movie was Little Odessa from 1994, in which the filmmaker already showed some of the themes that would trespass his whole filmography. Gray then made a non-intentional trilogy of movies -- The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007), and Two Lovers (2008) -- with Joaquin Phoenix playing a key role. The Yards were nominated for the Palme D'or at Cannes, one of the major prizes in the European circuit of festivals. When divulging the work for the Joker movie in 2019, Toronto International Film Festival called on the director to talk about the actor and Joaquin Phoenix's capacity to work on demonstrating anguish and sadness.
Gray's work would continue through the tens with The Immigrant (2013), The Lost City of Z (2016), and Ad Astra (2019). In these last two, Gray would go out of New York as a set to explore bigger-scale plots while not abandoning the themes of his career. He showed that he could work with a more extensive scale of filmmaking since both are epic odysseys staring big actors, such as Brad Pitt and Tom Holland. At some parts of the 2017 Oscar run, The Lost City of Z was on the Best Picture nomination table, but it didn't happen to be nominated.
A Different Approach to New York
From the first shots of most of his movies, you see how Grey sees New York. He is always running away from the landscapes and city lights. His shots are focused on transportation, daily packages coming from the trucks, the small size boats with fishes, a considerable unseen part of the routine to most people in the city's urban labyrinth is.
Gray's look for New York is at the structure and small mechanisms that result in the most known part of the city. He defines it through all his filmography in three parts that intersect and shape all the relationships around heritage, masculine frustration, and the forbidden. The characters are constantly surrounded by the shadows made by their families, struggling to accept that they'll become like them someday, trying to reach happiness through what is not acceptable in this structure.
The director connects it to the foundation of the city, built from immigrants that ran away from the static countries' structures they were inserted on. And see the current state of it as a big ironic joke, becoming what your first comers were running away from. The movies always end with a bittersweet climax that is always implied, not melodramatic choices, such as a big one-liner phrase or a fade in the soundtrack, but instead loneliness surrounded by the constant chaos of the city provides.
Gray's Films Feature Similar Conflict as Daredevil
Matt Murdock is easily the perfect James Gray protagonist. Murdock is haunted by his father's ghost, who died from not allowing himself to be won in a boxing match. He deals with the forbidden side of being a vigilante while dealing with the constant presence of the law in court. Every night, Murdock works to help as many pleading voices as he can hear.
Daredevil deserves a director that knows how to approach the character's adult themes and conflicts without letting it go to a teenage edginess of violence as proof of maturity and allowing New York and its underworld to become as important as the life and death situations the genre needs to establish.