Ira Sachs (2014)
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are a gay couple in Manhattan. Ben, a painter, has just turned seventy. George, the head of music at a Catholic school, is perhaps ten years younger. After nearly four decades together, they decide to marry and do so. The archdiocese disapproves and George loses his job. He continues to give private piano lessons but the two men can no longer afford the rent on their apartment. As a temporary arrangement while they look for somewhere affordable, George moves in with a younger gay couple in the same building. Ben goes to stay in Brooklyn with his nephew Elliot, who is married with a teenage son. Although they see each other during the day, the separation is painful to George and Ben. They miss each other deeply and their new domestic arrangements prove to be, in different ways, increasingly difficult. George’s hosts are two cops, Roberto (Manny Perez) and Ted (Cheyenne Jackson), who seem to have parties in the apartment most nights (and, when they don’t, are watching Game of Thrones). While Elliot (Darren Burrows), a photographer, is out during the day, his novelist wife Kate (Marisa Tomei) works from home and struggles to stay polite when lonesome, chatty Ben keeps interrupting her train of thought. The couple’s teenage son, Joey (Charlie Tahan), whose bedroom Ben shares, is particularly resentful of this invasion of his privacy. At Kate’s encouragement, Ben takes to going up on the roof of the apartment block to paint the New York skyline – and, posed against it, Joey’s sole friend, an older boy called Vlad (Eric Tabach). One day, as Ben re-enters the building from the roof, he has a fall and is hospitalised. A doctor diagnoses, as well as a shoulder injury, heart problems and advises that Ben see a cardiologist. At one of Roberto and Ted’s parties, George gets into conversation with a young Englishman, Ian (Christian Coulson), who’s about to leave New York for an exciting new job in Mexico City and who happens to have an apartment, with a controlled rent, for which he’s keen to find a new tenant. Ben dies suddenly. George moves into the new apartment alone.
This is more or less the plot of Love is Strange, which its director Ira Sachs co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias. Sachs, according to Wikipedia, is ‘openly gay’ (and lives and works in New York City). It’s therefore baffling that Ben and George have been characterised with kid gloves – the way that someone nervous of being seen as unsympathetic towards a gay couple might present them. At the start of the film, as the men get dressed and set off for their wedding and Ben fears they’ll be late, he seems a worrier while George is calmly reassuring; but this isn’t a hint of the personalities to come. The purpose of the contrast, as it turns out, is merely to liven up this opening sequence. Livening up isn’t, however, a hint of things to come either. Ira Sachs’s usual approach is to keep the camera on faces or, more often, on building interiors with Chopin piano music playing on the soundtrack – giving a suggestion of depth but never achieving it. Ben and George are both nicer than nice and there’s barely a whisper of tension between them throughout the film. At one point, George reveals to Ben that he suspected the archdiocese would react as it did to their marriage – in spite of the fact that the Catholic school powers-that-be, and George’s pupils and their parents, have long been aware of and, it seems, unconcerned by his sexuality. Ben doesn’t mind, though, and there’s no further discussion of whether their marriage, which has ruined their lives together, was a mistake. On their last evening, they go to a classical concert, then for a drink in a bar. The conversation there reveals that, while George has always been faithful, Ben has had occasional affairs with other men. George has always been OK with that too. He’s a practising Catholic but Ira Sachs gives no indication of what, if any, difference that makes to his life. George is a believer simply in order to underline, in the early scene in which he gets fired, how Christian and how accepting he is compared with the church authorities.
There’s no follow-through in Sachs and Zacharias’s screenplay – if there were, it might require scenes that disturbed the prevailing placidity of the film. (Does Ben see a cardiologist and, if he does, what’s the prognosis? George, if his voiceover is to be believed, writes an open letter to the parents of his former students, encouraging them to appeal to the archdiocese against his dismissal – with what result? What does Ben say to Elliot – or vice versa – when Kate finally loses patience and her rag with their guest, in Ben’s presence?) The film’s evasive lack of realism mightn’t be so bad if Sachs didn’t include so much detail about municipal taxes and rents and leasehold arrangements. There are times when Love is Strange seems to be about NYC real estate issues rather than ‘a graceful tribute to the beauty of commitment in the face of adversity’. Those words are taken from the Rotten Tomatoes summary description of the film, which introduces a 94% ‘fresh’ rating from 145 reviews: if Ira Sachs is confusing ‘compassion’ with inert wetness, he’s clearly not alone. While it’s hard enough to stay interested in Ben and George, it’s impossible to care less about the dreary Elliot, although the increasing focus on him and Kate at one stage seems to suggest we’re meant to. The only intriguing thing about this family’s life is the bunk beds in Joey’s bedroom. He’s an only child and clearly not one to have friends sleep over: Joey’s so isolated from his contemporaries at school that his parents have sought help from a psychologist. So who is the other bed for? Elliot and Kate have evidently just been waiting for Ben to take up residence.
Some of the actors conceal the feebleness of Love is Strange – particularly Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei and Charlie Tahan, who makes Joey’s dissatisfaction odd and raw. When Ben and George have their last drink, it’s in a bar that was the site of a gay rights protest in the 1960s: I liked the bit when Ben lies about his role in the protest and gets drinks on the house as a result. Otherwise, John Lithgow is required to be so blandly well-meaning that he got on my nerves as well as Joey’s. The film runs only 94 minutes but by halfway I was itching for something more to happen, however clichéd. (When Ben was in hospital, I thought there might be a crisis. When Ian showed George his apartment, I hoped they might have a one-night stand to shake things up.) Nothing doing – and even Ben’s demise is a screen non-event. When he and George say goodnight after their drink together and Ben disappears down to the subway, the camera stays on the empty street above for what is, even by Ira Sachs’s standards, a long time – so that you know it’s the last you’ll see of Ben. In the next scene, Joey visits George in his new apartment and apologises for not attending Ben’s funeral. Joey has brought with him, to give to George, Ben’s last work – the cityscape with Vlad at its centre. (While Ben is staying, Joey tells him he can’t be much of an artist or he wouldn’t be reduced to sleeping in a bunk bed in a kid’s room. This final painting, even allowing that it’s not quite complete, seems to bear Joey out.) A girl his own age is waiting for Joey when he leaves the building and they skateboard into the Manhattan sunset together: the example of Ben and George has taught Joey how to love! What happens immediately before this is of rather more interest. As he goes downstairs after saying goodbye to George, Joey stops and weeps. Is he remorseful that he said unkind things to Ben? If so, Joey has nothing to reproach himself for: his anger is water in the desert of Love is Strange.
5 March 2015
