A few weeks ago I watched We Own the Night (2007) and The Yards (2000) to see what the fuss over James Gray was all about. I wasn’t overly impressed with either film. Then I saw Two Lovers (2008). In the space of its 110 minute runtime Gray went from a mildly intriguing “director to watch” to someone who might merit serious consideration as one of my favorite contemporary American filmmakers.
So what happened? Two Lovers changed my mind about Gray in two ways: first, it showcased a sense of humor that I’d only detected once before, in the scene in The Yards in which the Olchin family sits down to a beautifully set table for a dinner of Chinese takeout. The awkward dinner party at the beginning of Two Lovers is funny, as is Gray’s use of transparent (the pickles that Dan Callahan discusses in his review of the film) and opaque (the statue looming over Joaquin Phoenix’s Leonard Kladitor as he waits for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Michelle and Elias Koteas’ Ronald to arrive for their strange dinner date) symbolic imagery. The knowledge that Gray realizes that some of the situations he puts his characters in, while deadly serious to them, will strike his audience as comically absurd makes the “heaviness” that is an attribute of his work seem less pervasive, less oppressive. Suddenly certain lines of dialogue (“I feel light as a feather”) from We Own the Night strike me as less clumsy, as less like the products of a tin ear and more like pressure valves that make almost unbelievably tense scenes bearable.
Second, my admiration for Two Lovers convinced me to check out Gray’s first film, Little Odessa (1994), giving me a complete picture of his feature film work. Gray’s oeuvre, perhaps more than that any other director I’ve yet encountered, is greater than the sum of its parts. The plots of all four of his films are driven by his characters’ inner turmoil over the choices that they’re constantly being forced to make between what they (think they) want for themselves and what (they think) their families want for them and by the external fallout from their decisions. These conflicts are never handled the same way twice and always play out differently; as a result, with each successive film it becomes clearer just what’s at stake. For instance: the travails of Mark Wahlberg’s “wrong man” Leo Handler in The Yards give us an idea of the kind of fate Gray’s other characters wish to avoid by aligning themselves with more powerful (the police force in We Own the Night), more prosperous (the Cohen-Kraditor dry cleaning empire in Two Lovers), or more free (America in Little Odessa) extended families. For instance: the decisions made by Tim Roth’s Joshua Shapira in Little Odessa and Joaquin Phoenix’s Bobby Green in We Own the Night mirror each other to a certain extent, giving us an idea of how things could have turned out differently for each character.
All of this definitely adds up to a director who interests me, but is James Gray “favorite director” material? I don’t yet have a fully developed eye for the purely structural and visual aspects of cinema, so I’ll need to take another look at both Two Lovers and We Own the Night to see what exactly he’s up to before I make my mind up for sure. This blog post by Zach Campbell is one of the things I’ve read that, along with my own impressions, leads me to believe there might be something there. In the meantime I’ll content myself with looking forward to Gray’s next film.
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Briefly, since I don’t know how much I actually have to say about this: I note above that “I don’t yet have a fully developed eye for the purely structural and visual aspects of cinema.” I wonder sometimes whether this would be true if I didn’t have the luxury of knowing that most of the films I watch will eventually be readily available in a format (DVD) that allows for close study; in other words, do I watch movies differently than I would if I wasn’t born in the home video era? Am I more inclined to let myself get “swept up” in a movie because I believe I’ll always be able to go back to it later and pay stricter attention to how it works?
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