Shades of Gray: On James Gray's Early Work

There should be no irony; you are invited by the movie to be totally empathetic with the people in it. We would never talk down to or be condescending to them.--James Gray on Two Lovers 

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My introduction to filmmaker James Gray came about through his second feature, The Yards, which screened at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival with Gray and actors Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in attendance (the film also stars James Caan, Faye Dunaway, and an unrecognizably brunette, Joan Jett-icized Charlize Theron).

Gray was nervous about presenting such a personal film--the title refers to the Queens rail yards, where his father toiled--in front of such a large audience, but he provided an eloquent introduction, citing Rocco and His Brothers as an influence.  Phoenix, who is quite good in the movie, looked ill at ease and said he was uncomfortable speaking in public. Wahlberg tried to get him to say more, but to no avail. After the film concluded, Wahlberg, who couldn't have been more at ease, threatened to launch into one of his Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch raps if the audience didn't ask any questions. That got a big laugh, and people started to pipe up. 

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The only thing that you can do is try to make sure the film looks beautiful, better than you had imagined, as it slips away from you... If you hire the right people, they can give you something better and more beautiful than you’d ever imagined.--James Gray on all of his films  

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Despite the favorable festival response, The Yards was a non-starter at the box office. It must not have been a priority for Miramax, as I don't recall much of a promotional push. If more people had known about it, I'm certain it would've done better. Gray followed up with another crime film, 2007's We Own the Night, which felt rote and lackluster in comparison, despite solid, but not spectacular work from Wahlberg and Phoenix. (And I don't want to lay too much blame at Eva Mendes' feet, but she's no match for the other actresses who've populated Gray's pictures, notably Oscar winners Theron and Gwyneth Paltrow.) 

As with Luchino Visconti's B&W film,The Yards may be melodramatic, but Gray is looking specifically to the classic European and American melodramas of the 1960s and '70s, and not just amping everything up for the hell of it. The pace is stately but not lugubrious--cinematographer Harris Savides' use of ochre and siena hues recalls the work of Gordon Willis in The Godfather--and the actors make the Old Testament- style dialogue sound surprisingly realistic. Every decision can mean life or death for these characters, and they usually make the wrong ones. 

With 2008's Two Lovers, now available on DVD, Gray returns to the Russian-American milieu of Little Odessa, which I caught just after The Yards. Since his second feature was still percolating in my mind, I wrote the following review. For anyone new to his work, I recommend starting here before moving on to The Yards or Two Lovers. The latter operates almost as a twin, and reunites the director with Phoenix, who imbues Lovers with one of his strangest, most effective performances to date. 

LITTLE ODESSA ***
(James Gray, USA, 1994, 98 mins) 

Only 25 at the time, James Gray wrote and directed this downbeat, but remarkably well executed debut. The soundtrack that accompanies the small-scale drama proves particularly unusual in that it consists primarily of hushed choral arrangements of pieces by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Mussogorsky. 

It's not what you would expect from a post-Tarantino film about a hit man, Joshua Shapira (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction veteran Tim Roth), and the havoc his career wreaks on his Brighton Beach-based Russian immigrant parents (Maximilian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave) and his younger brother (Edward Furlong).  

Like Elijah Wood, Furlong--at the time--looked as if he was here to stay. So many child stars fade from view once they hit adolescence or make the awkward transition into adulthood with the hyper-critical eyes of the world upon them, like Macaulay Culkin, a virtual has-been at the age of 14. But Furlong persevered, for awhile, after shooting to fame in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, by taking on more interesting and less commercial roles in films like American History X and Pecker. He looked to have a good, long career ahead of him. Well into his teens by 1994, he plays a kid here, but this is definitely a film geared towards adults.

In Little Odessa, Furlong takes the lead over the better known, more experienced actors who surround him, easily stealing the film right out from under Roth--who isn't bad, but this isn't one of his standout roles--and that makes the shocker of an ending all the more tragic. 

Gray's first effort hews to the gloomy side, but it's hard not to admire the skill that went into its making, from the mournful soundtrack to the moody camera work, focusing on the snow-covered Russian section of Brooklyn--the Little Odessa of the title--to the economical script and, finally, to the naturalistic acting of the entire cast. Little Odessa won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and marks James Gray as a director to watch.

Endnote: Except for Little Odessa, Joaquin Phoenix has appeared in all of Gray's movies, making him the Pacino to his Lumet or the De Niro to his Scorsese, comparisons a classicist like Gray would probably appreciate. Images and quotes from ICG Magazine (picture by Anne Joyce, words by David Heuring), Big Pond, and Moviemaker. Cross-posted here.

The Man in the White Suit: Tony Manero

TONY MANERO
(Pablo Larraín, Chile/Brazil, 2008, 

95 minutes)

"Al Pacino! 

Attica! Attica! Attica!"
--Tony Manero 

(John Travolta)

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As played by John Travolta, the Tony Manero of John Badham's 1977 Saturday Night Fever was a 19-year-old Brooklyn stud with a penchant for white suits and black shirts. As played by Alfredo Castro, the Raúl Peralta of Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero is a 52-year-old Santiago stud-wannabe with a penchant for white suits and black shirts.

In Badham's cultural touchstone, the lanky lead imagined himself as a disco-dancing Al Pacino: tough, but smooth (note the Serpico poster on his wall). Compact, wiry Raúl, on the other hand, actually looks like the Pacino of a decade ago--before the eye work and the curiously orange complexion. If he isn't exactly smooth, he's tougher than the preening Tony ("Watch the hair!"), because this aspiring entertainer doubles as a brutal killer.

In his second feature film, Larraín establishes Raúl's contradictory nature in brief, but effective brushstrokes: Peralta's obsession with Saturday Night Fever in 1978 provides a release from the unrelenting gloom of life under dictatorial President Augusto Pinochet, while his lethal escapades allow him to eliminate rivals and to obtain goods he couldn't otherwise afford.

As with Pacino's Tony Montana, Travolta's blue-collar Manero wasn't born to wealth either, but he worked for his money. As Raúl's junkyard associate tells him, "Things cost what they cost, not what you want them to cost," sensible words that mean nothing to a cold-blooded sociopath. When Raúl decides that his performance space needs a lighted-glass floor and a mirror ball, in order to recreate Fever's 2001 Odyssey in miniature, he finds some cruelly creative ways to make it happen (he and his three-person troupe live in the apartments above the cantina where they dance the nights away).

Further, he doesn't lack for female companionship, but like Warren Beatty's infamous bank robber in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, Raúl's impotence extends to his entire existence. Unlike Clyde Barrow, however, his appeal for the opposite sex strains credibility. The low-rent Pinochet of his barrio, he's cold and grubby, and neither charms nor satisfies the ladies in his life, which seems to be Larraín's deeply cynical point. i.e. that the Chilean dictator's antipathy acted as an aphrodisiac on his more masochistic citizens.

Though he's in nearly every frame, trained stage actor and co-writer Castro gives an otherwise vanity-free performance. If most antiheroes have one or two compensating qualities, Raúl is about as likeable as Michael Rooker's title character in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and those who failed to find the humor in Henry--it's there--are likely to feel the same way about Tony Manero, its unlikely socio-political South American analogue.

While some critics have described the film as "ugly," both literally and figuratively, there's a cruel beauty to Larraín's assured direction, the Super 16 cinematography (blown up to 35mm), and occasional, disorienting out-of-focus shot, making Tony Manero a fever dream in every sense of the term.

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Tony Manero (John Travolta): "Oh fuck the future!"
Fusco (Sam Coppola): "No, Tony! You can't fuck the future. The future fucks you! It catches up with you and it fucks you if you ain't planned for it!"



Tony Manero plays the Northwest Film Forum 8/21-27. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill. For more information, please click here or call 206-829-7863. Images from Highlighter (John Travolta), MUBI (Alfredo Castro), and IMDb (Castro).

Barry Jenkins: He’s Gotta Have It, Part Six

A Chat with Barry Jenkins (click here for part five)

Are any of your short films available on DVD?

The thing about going to Florida State University is that I wouldn’t be a filmmaker if there wasn’t a film school there. That’s just fact. And the beauty of Florida State is that you pay tuition which, for me as a Florida student, was $1000 a semester and everything was covered: the equipment, stock, editing facilities, crew. I mean, it was the works, it was everything, but they own your films when you’re done with them.

I had the opposite experience. I majored in art, and aside from the expensive tuition, we had to buy canvas and paint, which adds up, so that’s really interesting.
I probably paid more than you, and I own those works, but I was in debt for a long time. I went to Whitman which, for the Northwest, is a really expensive school.

The training was invaluable, it was absolutely invaluable.

Maybe they’ll do something with them, like a collection of student films.

My Josephine is available as part of Crafting Short Screenplays. There’s a chapter on Josephine and a DVD comes with the book. The screenplay and movie are in there.

That’s cool. That’s an interesting way to see it. Many times when I see a
first feature that I like, I want to go back and watch the director’s shorts.

That’s how I fell in love with Lynn Ramsay. I saw her film Morvern Callar…

I saw her shorts after her features.

I did too. I met her at the Telluride Film Festival in the student symposium.

What’s that? I’ve only heard of the film festival.

You haven’t heard of the symposium? Well, the festival has an education program. You write an essay, and they invite 50 students out, and you watch the movies.

It’s an expensive festival, so that’s a good deal.

It’s really expensive, so you get a free pass, you just travel yourself out. You have to put yourself up, too, and they encourage you to bundle up, like 10 kids in a con-
do. You have a certain schedule: you see films, and after you watch them, you get an hour in a classroom setting with the director. It was wonderful. We watched Morvern Callar, and then we sat down and talked with Lynne for an hour. We watched City of God, and then we sat down and talked with Fernando [Meirelles] for an hour. We saw Russian Ark, and then we sat and talked about it with the DP [Tilman Büttner] for an hour. We saw Spider, and we talked to [David] Cronenberg for an hour. It was abso-
lutely ridiculous. Even Dave McKean was there with these two short films, and I don’t think anyone’s ever seen those movies. We got to sit down with him. It was a really great experience. So, I watched Morvern Callar, and I was like, “I love this film.” Lynne brought Ratcatcher, which I also loved, and then I saw the shorts.

The shorts are really good, too. I saw them…well, maybe I’ve only seen one. I have that Cinema16 release, a series of great foreign short films, so I finally got caught up with the short that won the Oscar. And another one, I think it’s called Fly.

That’s Wasp, from a different filmmaker, Andrea Arnold, who was also at Telluride.

That’s funny. I do confuse the two.

She was at Telluride with Wasp. She’s great, she’s funny.

[They're both female Scottish filmmakers born in the '60s. Though Ramsay has never won an Oscar, she won Cannes Jury Awards for Gasman and Small Deaths.]

You and Lynn Shelton definitely like some of the same filmmakers.

Lynn and I are in love with the same filmmakers: Yes! [laughs]

I became aware of her because of her first film…

We Go Way Back.

Which I really hope more people get to see. I really wanted to meet
her, and she’s the friend of a friend, so it was easy to set up. I com-
pared it to [the work of] Claire Denis, which made her so happy.

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Jenkins and I proceeded to chat for another 10 minutes or so, mostly about the struggle
to pay the rent while shooting a film (during his tenure at Banana Republic in, I think, the shipping department, he wrote three screenplays) and adaptations, like Morvern Callar and John Hillcoat's upcoming version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but this is the point at which my tape ends, and I only brought one. Incidentally, my recorder ceased to function halfway through our conversation, so Jenkins took a look at it, determined the problem,
and with the judicious insertion of a tiny piece of crumpled-up paper, he fixed it.


Fellow Florida State University alum James Laxton

Endnote: Images from Popcorn Reel and Strike Anywhere Films.