Movie: Love Is Strange (Ira Sachs, 2014)
Ira Sachs may well be a poor man's Spike Lee. That is not in any way intended as an insult - no shame in being a somewhat worse filmmaker than Spike Lee, while sharing similar feelings and ideas about life, films and New York. The comparison is also not intended to be a definite statement. I have only seen two films by Sachs - this one and Little Men. My favorite thing about both is that they use their basic setups as a jumping board for a broader look at city life, digressing from the main plot to introduce characters and places we come to care about despite seeing them sometimes only for a single scene. The dude moving to Mexico-City here, for example, is given a deeper inner life and more specificity and wit than some films give to their main characters. This approach helps create a wonderfully vibrant picture of New York as a community where all kinds of various characters try to live good, decent and interesting lives and where the problems, challenges and desires of each of these characters are not independent from each other. They are all shaped by the political, social and economic realities of the city.
Spike Lee's films identify the racist roots of many of these realities and love black Americans more than your average Hollywood production. Predictably, Spike Lee has been accused of reverse racism for these reasons. Those accusations are disingenuous for many reasons, including the fact that Spike Lee also presents white people with more empathy and love than your average Hollywood production. Similarly, Ira Sachs, (who is a middle-aged gay man), presents straight teens, with more understanding and care than most contemporary American directors. He understands that teens' discovery that they are hormonal beings and that love, sex and friendship are distinctly different things that produce distinctly different feelings can be incredibly confusing. Especially because they do not last forever. Friendships end, sometimes for dumb reasons that you can't quite understand.
Sachs is not as good at portraying marital strife and does not really use Marisa Tomei to her full potential here. He does luckily use John Lithgow and Alfred Molina to their full potential. I did not know that Lithgow had received an Oscar nomination for playing a trans woman in The World According to Garp, but I've always known him as an actor who emphasises his softness and his vulnerability. I was a fan of 3rd Rock From The Sun, and much of what made that show work was Lithgow's performance as a man who feels vulnerable and uncomfortable in his body, but tries to hide it by pretending he is a confident pater familias. This may be a somewhat offensive attempt to explain why I am not surprised to see that he feels so at ease playing a gay man. In any case, Lithgow and Molina really manage to convey their love for each other and their long complicated history. Which makes the film's ending only more frustrating. It feels cheaply manipulative and inelegant to kill off Lithgow, despite the fact that his death had been set up.
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