Blog - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 11:26 - 8 Comments

Gray in the 2000s

by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Went to see Two Lovers a second time. A warm March evening, driving drizzle–more wind than rain. A weekday–the theater was so quiet that the box office had been shut down; tickets were being sold from behind the concessions counter. The movie had been playing for a few weeks; it had moved to the smallest house, and we were there with only a handful of people in the audience, mostly old ladies. There were two teenage girls, college freshmen probably; they talked through most of the movie and then left 30 minutes before the end. I’ll say that there’s something affirming about a walkout: the moment someone dramatically leaves a movie, it forces the rest of us in the audience to become aware of the fact that is our decision to stay. We become, if only towards these two people, defenders of the film. We confirm that whatever they’re bored with, we’re invested enough in to go through with it to the end. We and the old ladies confirm that we are pro-Gray.

Considering the amount of time producing a movie takes nowadays, we can be pretty sure James Gray won’t release another feature before the decade ends; he’s got only 8 months, and these aren’t the 1930s. So the calendar has provided us with this complete thing–”James Gray in the 2000s”–to think about. Three features: one at the start of the decade, two towards the end, and each one better than the last. A cast of familiar elements: those cramped family gatherings (if Ernst Lubitsch owned the bedroom, Gray owns the den in American cinema), the metaphors of the Brighton Beach boardwalk, relatives in all of their permutations, the loud dance clubs, the neighbor, the city that doesn’t seem large enough. And, above all, a feeling, the unintellectual intelligence of a man who knows people but doesn’t pretend to understand them. And who knows and feels the Movie but doesn’t pretend to be its only master. Gray’s abandonment of youthful posturing might be what’s keeping him from being respected in this country. We like to have people point out where we should be looking. We like films that tell us that they’re important or tell us that they’re original. None of Gray’s last three features tell us these things. And every one of them is important and is original–from the milky criminality of The Yards to the moral fog of We Own the Night to the inelegant beauty of Two Lovers, which embarrasses us into honesty. This red-bearded man from Queens, this self-deprecating talker is, almost secretly, one of America’s most passionate directors.

The young gangster who cuts his own throat. Robert Duvall nonchalantly collapsing into the arms of a boxer. A man running his hand over the hand of his comatose brother. A tear running down the cheek of a cool and careless young tough, his hair slicked back, a stud earring glistening from his right earlobe. A man drinking awkwardly in the corner of a fancy restaurant, the table too large for him. The great railyard, with the train passing in the distance. The loner who watches a beautiful woman walk away from his apartment through the peephole in the door. There are hundreds of images to remember from the movies of James Gray. But, above all, we remember feelings.

Lonesome

Gray once described history as “an accumulation of details” in an interview. It’s a fairly good way to approach his films: they are accumulations. The viewer Gray envisions for his films is an audience and not a reader; a movie directed by him invites feeling the same way it eludes analysis. We’ve taken to calling this naïveté or old-fashioned simplicity, which is fucking misleading: analysis is easy; emotion is embarrassing. Gray is uncool, terminally undistanced. His camera doesn’t so much capture something as throw its arms around it, embracing it with the lens.

It’s a film noir plot: an ex-con framed by his upstanding best friend for murder. Joaquin Phoenix is an impulsive and unwitting Death, pale with jet-black hair, and Mark Wahlberg is the man forced to suffer the consequences of his friend’s actions. He’s on his own, trying to outrun personal motives disguised as political ones; politics here is just a way to disguise crime, and society is just the sum of caprices.

Night and Fog

The world seems simplest to those who ignore its complications. We Own the Night presents morality as a cloud of cigarette smoke that can be swatted away. Here the image of the person who wants to act morally is not that of someone answering some trumpet call, but of a man who chooses to disappear into an opaque fog. It begins so crisply and articulately and travels into an increasingly hazy world.

A misunderstanding that might be attributed to marketing: We Own the Night was reviewed largely as a brothers-on-opposite-sides-of-the-law drama, as if the reviewers were comparing the film against the promise of its poster. Really, it concerns only one brother (the second spends most of the film in a hospital and has only a fraction of our attention) and he’s not a criminal, a point that’s central to the film. He lives as most people do, never actively engaging with either “morality” or “immorality.” Joaquin Phoenix is the manager of a dance club in Brooklyn in the late 1980s. His family (brother Mark Wahlberg and father Robert Duvall) are Russian-American police officers. Phoenix has changed his last name and assumed a generic “American” ethnicity. His life is full of ordinary pleasures (good company, sex, pot) and affections (his friends, his job, and his girlfriend, played by Eva Mendes). His serious family seems to live apart from the world and the film chronicles his withdrawl from life as he becomes a police informant and then a full-fledged cop. Secreted to a cocaine sorting facility in a dimly-lit apartment, he is forced to put on a face mask that turns every face into a set of darting eyes: “morality” doesn’t provide a design for living, and its ambiguity only drives him to become more paranoid and vindictive.

Knife in the Head

The Yards, like his 1994 debut Little Odessa, showed a James Gray who was part of a larger tradition of American movies. With We Own the Night he seemed to get further away from it, and with Two Lovers he now stands on his own, completely unlike any of his American contemporaries. Almost an inversion of We Own the Night, it’s a humiliating romance that begins as a dream and at the end coalesces into painful reality, sharp as a knife.

Traveling outward instead of inward, Two Lovers starts as a film about the soul and becomes a film about the body. The body, which is really an anchor or a stone, dragging you down to some murky depth, never as agile or graceful as you want it to be. The body makes children older than their parents hope and makes time pass faster than it should and gives us a quivering voice when we wish we could be eloquent. So here is a movie about people who can’t speak like they want to, who make jokes but aren’t funny, who try to kiss but realize they aren’t romantic. About sunlight, which blinds instead of warming, and night, which casts unflattering shadows instead of enveloping. And about the tenderness that occurs despite all of these things and that weird miracle that allows us to almost understand what another person is saying even if the words don’t seem right. A sort of ballet for awkward dancers or an opera for untrained singers. It’s a movie, in some ways, about the success of failure, full of grand gestures that go unnoticed, where a person ready to throw their whole life away finds it sneaking back, like a cat.

The Unbelievable Truth

I’m thinking of a phrase: “the unbelievable truth.” It’s could have been an alternate title for We Own the Night or Two Lovers. Gray, like the similarly “unbelievable” Hal Hartley (who used the phrase as the title of his debut feature), is at odds with the attitude that values “authenticity” (i.e. verisimilitude) over truth. Gray is Realist in a strictly pre-Neo-Realist sense: he is after what he sees as real without trying to create an aesthetic of “reality.” We like directors to be, above all, convincing liars, and Gray (like Hartley) is incapable of lying.

I’m also thinking of the deeply emotional work of two great anthropologists-turned-filmmakers, Pál Fejõs and Jean Rouch–especially Fejõs and his New York-set silent film, Lonesome. For all the sociological details that make up their films (for Gray, Brighton Beach and its Jewish community; for Hartley, working class Long Island and, later, the post-national cities of Asia, Europe and the Middle East), they’re less the aim of the films than the natural result of the directors’ backgrounds. What they’re getting at is not observation, but expression: the movies are inarticulatable articulations of the humanity they feel around them. So Gray sits alone, and tries to describe what he sees: moral murk and failed tenderness.

Two Lovers is currently playing in theaters.

We Own the Night and The Yards are available on DVD.