The Screengrab : we own the night

Screengrab Q & A: James Gray and "Two Lovers"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:30:00 GMT

The writer-director James Gray's last movie, We Own the Night, had the most visually stunning car chase scene in some thirty years, and that's an achievement that a lot of moviemakers would be happy to retire on. But though Gray knows his way around an action scene, his first three features are all stories about men involved in crime that can't be easily shoehorned as genre movies. His latest, Two Lovers (which Nick Schager reviewed earlier this week), might at first glance seem to be a change of pace, because the violence is all emotional. But on a deeper level, the movie, in which Gray returns to the Brighton Beach area of his feature debut Little Odessa and reunites with the star of The Yards and We Own the Night, Joaquin Phoenix, is of a piece with his earlier work, all family dramas about people in extreme situations torn apart by mixed feelings and divided loyalties.

How did you come around to wanting to tell this story?

It was really a combination of three different things that sort of inspired the movie. I was at a party with Gwynneth Paltrow, and she said to me, "Y'know, I'm quitting acting, and I'm just gonna raise my kids." And I said, "That's terrible, because you have a real gift, and now you're not going to use it." And she said, "Well, what do you care? We were never gonna work together, you make movies about guys who shoot guns off all the time." Which sucked.

And it wasn't how you saw yourself?

Well, I kinda did, but at the same time, you don't want people thinking that's all you can do. So the seed was planted then, and you might almost say this movie was my rejoinder. Then I got my wife pregnant, and we both had to go to a genetic counsellor. It turns out there are sixteen or seventeen disorders that are connected to your genetic makeup. There's something called Tasacs disease, which is a genetic disorder. My wife and I were fine, but I learned that if the man and the woman are both potential carriers, the child has such-and-such a chance of getting the disease. And the counsellor told me that couples break up over this. I thought that was interesting, and it got me to thinking about the precarious nature of relationships, but I just sort of put it in the drawer, thinking maybe later I could do something with it.

Then, when I was waiting to start shooting We Own the Night, I was waiting for Mark Wahlberg to be available, and one night I pulled this collection of novellas and short stories by Dostoevsky off the shelf one night, and I read "White Nights." I had read it twenty years earlier, and then I was too young to really read it. This time, I read it and I thought, what a wonderful story about the unknowable nature of desire. I thought, this is something worth pursuing. But I couldn't really remake that film; it's already been made into a film by Visconti, and Bresson did his own version. But in a way, it could use updating. I thought that if you told that story today, the person would probably be under heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and he'd be called bipolar or manic depressive, any of the maladies that have been invented because of the advent of psychoanalysis. And I thought that I could use a couple that broke up, maybe because of the fear of something like Tasac's disease, as a starting point.

So I decided that the challenge here would be to make a movie about love and desire and have it not be a comedy. I wanted to play it straight, and for it to have ... [pause] an authenticity of emotion. I wanted to do it with no postmodern irony and no jokes at the expense of the characters, so that we would be totally with them. I just thought that would be worth pursuing as an experiment. It's funny, because in most ways it's the least autobiographical of the films I've made. But some people have said, oh this must be more autobiographical than your other films, and I go--[expression of horror]--No! I mean, I'm happily married, to this fabulously beautiful woman, but I guess what they mean, I hope what they mean, is that I try to put myself into the film as much as I can.

Joaquin Phoenix's performance struck me as really brilliant, and it's very daring. It shows a real willingness to risk the audience not liking him, and even, as you say, to laugh at him because he's so openly vulnerable. You've worked with him twice before; did you have him in mind for this from the start?

I wrote the part for him and I would not have made the movie if he hadn't wanted to do it. He's unbelievably complex, and he really knows how to relate the inner turmoil of a person who's kind of at war with himself. He's an artist, and his only priority when he's working is to the character. That's really rare.

What about Gwynneth Paltrow? Because she also shows a side of herself here that I'm not sure she's explored in a movie before.

I've known her socially and loved her personally, and I know her as a very different person that whatever's this public image of her, but I didn't know what it would be like working with her. Joacquin and I were both very nervous about it, because we'd heard that she likes to do two or three takes, no improvisation, knows her lines, does it very precisely, and goes home. And Joaquin and I like to do twenty, thirty takes, do a lot of improvisation, really explore. And we just adored working with her. She has such emotional intelligence, and was so present in the scenes. And what I found was that, working with her, Joaquin started to become more precise, and she started to improvise, and they sort of met somewhere in the middle. It was a very happy set.

You seem to have a history of getting actors who might have some kind of established image and getting something different from them than they've shown before.

Actors are kind of hostage to context, very much hostage to the narratives they're in. Movie drama is so intimate, and you can see what the actor is doing all the time, so there's no lying in movies. Its emotional truth twenty-four frames a second, and you either believe it or you don't. And if you don't believe it, you don't believe it forty feet high. I try to give actors a context where they can play more than one thing, and sadly, I don't think they often get a chance to try to do that. I think that most American movies ask the actors to only play one level of performance, which is the action in the scene, not what's going on beneath.

The movie has this view of the destructive possibilities of love and the choices people make that's a little scary. And finally, you have this ambiguous sort of ending that probably looks like an uncomplicated happy ending, except that the person at the center of it all knows that it's not that simple.

An upbeat ending is fake, unless it's something like a Fred Astaire musical, which is meant to be transcend reality. And an unhappy ending is gratuitous and bleak and often just a kind of bogus existentialism. So what you want to do is square the circle and present an ending that could be perceived as part bitter, part sweet, because that's life. You know, when the Titanic sank, there were seven hundred survivors, and half of the witnesses believed that the ship broke in two as it sank, and the other half believed that the ship just basically went... [points his hand down and mimes it diving straight towards the floor] Two people who saw the exact same thing can have two completely different reactions, and that to me is a presentation of the world, in complete.

Review: "Two Lovers"

Nick Schager — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As a director, James Gray is an old-school anachronism, not only because of his fondness for straightforward genre mechanisms but, just as crucially, for his dedication to melodramatic sincerity. That quality takes center-screen in Two Lovers, a romance whose earnestness borders on the creaky yet has a way of creeping under one’s skin, crowding out any minor concerns about the stolidity of its love-triangle narrative. As in The Yards and We Own the Night, Gray’s latest benefits from an impeccable sense of place, in this case modern-day Brooklyn, whose windy chill, intimacy and ethnic character all lend warm, comfortable authenticity to the tale of Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), the son of a Jewish dry cleaner back living with his parents after having been left by his fiancé and committed, post-suicide attempt, to a mental hospital. Leonard’s downcast eyes and penchant for mumbled monosyllabic utterances express a damaged soul but Phoenix, acutely in tune with Gray’s depiction of his milieu (in this, his third collaboration with the director), refuses to reduce his indecisive protagonist to simply the walking wounded. Playfulness flirting around the corners of his eyes and mouth, and immature stubbornness lurking underneath his surface hesitancy, Leonard is a man hurt but not hopeless, his spirit – as evidenced by a supremely evocative opening wannabe-fatal dive off a pier – scarred but not irrevocably so.

Unable to off himself, Leonard returns home to a dad (Moni Moshonov) concerned and a mom (Isabella Rossellini) on pins and needles, as well as two women who waltz into his life and provide Two Lovers with its title. The first is Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), whom Leonard’s parents set him up with in a fairly transparent effort to solidify a business deal with Sandra’s father. Brunette, sensible and nurturing, she’s the smart choice, which would make her the choice for Leonard if not for the appearance of Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a striking blonde with thorny issues – a bothersome father, a drug addiction, a relationship with a married lawyer colleague (Elias Koteas) who pays for her apartment in Leonard’s parents’ building – that strike a chord with troubled Leonard. They’re yin-yang mother-lover poles, a dichotomy whose schematism would be vexing if not for the passion, as well as the sober rationalism, with which Gray dramatizes the scenario. Not once does the director treat his material with anything less than heartfelt intensity free of winks, nudges or concessions to overblown hysterics. Instead he focuses so intently on character details (such as Leonard’s idiosyncratic habit of counting train cars as they approach a station) and setting (the blustery cold of an apartment building rooftop, the euphoric, sizzling-color energy of a club, all captured in beautifully unfussy, classical widescreen) that the gradual development and resolution of the plot seems not rote but fervent, prickly, alive.

Conscious that Sandra is maternal and reliable (“I want to take care of you” she tells him over lunch), and incapable of squelching his uncontrollable ardor for Michelle, Leonard ensnares himself in a situation that must, inevitably, lead to a choice between following his head and his heart, between remaining in his socioeconomic class or venturing outside it, between embracing home or plunging headfirst into the wild, vast unknown. Emboldened by performances – Phoenix needy and reckless, Shaw invitingly anodyne, Paltrow desperate and messily desirable – whose unaffectedness obliterates the roles’ conventionality, the passionate Two Lovers eventually sides with its protagonist’s more imprudent impulses. However, if Gray’s film is romantic, it’s not of a comforting sort, miring itself in the implacable irrationality of desire, and the self-destruction that it can wreak. Barreling forward, engagement ring in pocket, to a final decision, Leonard is cast as a man in thrall to emotions over which he has no reign, and in his helplessness – and his decision to follow said feelings through to their risky conclusion – Gray finds as much sorrow as bliss. Love is exhilarating, maddening and cruel in Two Lovers, and tragedy, if one might call it that, comes not just from painful loss, but from being forced to compromise, to settle for more than one could have hoped for and yet less than one momentarily dared to dream.

Morning Deal Report: Brad Pitt Seeks Lost City

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

We Own the Night director James Gray is adapting the nonfiction book The Lost City of Z for Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B. Pitt will star as British soldier and spy Percy Fawcett, who “left Victorian society to explore in the Amazon, and he became obsessed by the idea of an advanced civilization he called Z, which he believed existed in the depths of the jungle. Along with his son, Fawcett headed into the jungle in 1925 in search of Z and was never seen again,” Variety reports.

Mumblecore mavens the Duplass Brothers are set to make their studio debut with “an intergenerational comedy” for Fox Searchlight. “The studio is in talks with Marisa Tomei, John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill to star in the film, which will center on a budding romance between a man (Reilly) and woman (Tomei) that the woman's son (Hill) attempts to foil,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Get ready to hold your lighters aloft. “New Line has won an auction for screen rights to Rock of Ages, a stage musical that does with '80s rock anthems what Mamma Mia! did with Abba tunes,” Variety reports. “The show is propelled by signature '80s rock anthems popularized by Journey, Twisted Sister, Joan Jett, Pat Benatar, Foreigner, Bon Jovi and REO Speedwagon.” What, no Loverboy?

Related:
Brad Pitt Jilts Aronofsky Again
Die Mumblecore Die

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, one of 2007's best films comes to DVD, and a master's musicals get the box-set treatment.

DVD of the Week: Most of the most beloved films of Ernst Lubitsch's career come from its final years, when the Lubitsch touch had already become well-established. But it's easy to forget that the master had already had a fruitful career long before Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. With the films included in this box set, Lubitsch was one of the first filmmakers to integrate song and narrative after the advent of talkies. But this would mean little today if the films themselves didn't hold up, and they do, with all of Lubitsch's trademark charm and Pre-Code sophistication. Eclipse has given their typical treatment (no extras, but lovely transfers) to the films The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour With You, and The Smiling Lieutenant, which boast some of the era's quintessential stars — Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Jeannette MacDonald. As always, Eclipse and parent company Criterion succeed in filling in another hole in cinema history.

Incidentally, today is my birthday, so if anyone out there is looking for a suitable gift, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

A bumper crop of more recent films being released on DVD this week, including: Ben Affleck's surprisingly great Gone Baby Gone (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); James Gray's searing crime drama We Own the Night; Becoming Jane (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray), the second Austen-themed dramedy in as many weeks; John Cusack in The Martian Child (New Line); No Reservations (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring remake of 2001's Mostly Martha; Tyler Perry's latest hit, Why Did I Get Married? (Lionsgate); the Apollo-mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm); and John Turturro's polarizing star-studded quasi-musical, Romance and Cigarettes (Sony). In addition, this week finally sees the DVD release of Amy Heckerling's long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Entertainment), starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, and Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. If nothing else, now we can see what all the fuss was about.

Back to classics, this week also brings Sony's The Stanley Kramer Film Collection, a collection of five films Kramer directed and/or produced. The centerpiece of the set is a new 40th Anniversary Edition of Kramer's once-controversial interracial-marriage drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Also in the set is the Kramer-directed Ship of Fools, as well as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, A Member of the Wedding, and The Wild One, all of which he produced.

Other older films coming to DVD include: The Joan Crawford Collection Volume 2 (Warner), which includes Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, Flamingo Road, and Torch Song; Fox's Charlie Chan Collection Volume 4; and Kenneth Branagh's 1991 dramedy Peter's Friends (MGM), boasting an enviable cast, including Branagh, then-wife Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton. For some reason, MGM has seen fit to package the film in a box set alongside the misguided Elmore Leonard/Paul Schrader satire Touch, the 1988 Patrick Dempsey-Jennifer Connelly vehicle Some Girls, and Scott Baio and Willie Aames in Zapped! Strange bedfellows indeed.

Finally, if you're jonesing for TV on DVD, this week sees the release of season 1 of The Equalizer (Universal), as well as the Vern-approved Blade: the Series (New Line). But fear not — only one more week until the release of Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season, the rare DVD that can be enjoyed by both Chuck Norris fans and Conan O'Brien watchers.

The Movie Moment(s): Notable Moments of 2007, Part 2

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Seth's secret shame, Superbad

2007 was a great year for dark and despairing cinema, but less so for really good comedy. But if nothing else, it can lay claim to at least one comedy sequence for the ages, even while it's so raunchy it would've made Curly Howard blush. In the scene, Seth (Jonah Hill) confesses to his best friend Evan (Michael Cera) his longstanding compulsion to draw penises. Of course, Evan has a hard time believing it (2007's funniest line in a walk: "Dicks? Like a man dick?") but the wonder of the scene is that Hill plays it completely straight. Seth is clearly ashamed of himself, angered by the trouble it's brought him, and annoyed that no one seems to understand his plight. In addition, screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (note the first names) make the details in the scene so specific that I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't drawn from real life. Which, of course, only makes it that much funnier.

Chase in the rain, We Own the Night

A lot of people would claim that the chase sequence at the end of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof is the year's best action scene, but I'd go to the mat instead for James Gray's We Own the Night. Tarantino's was well-choreographed and nicely sustained to be sure, but it couldn't match the pure visceral impact of Gray's. For one thing, there's real urgency in the scene- Joaquin Phoenix's Bobby has just learned that his former Russian mob associates have not only figured out where he's hiding but are planning to kill his police chief dad, and he's racing through the rain to stop this from happening. In addition, the direction is almost unbearably tense, as Gray shoots the scene entirely from inside Phoenix's car, with brutal violence glimpsed through his windshield as the wiper blades whoosh back and forth. Gray has never been known as an action director, but he shows a gift for it here, which makes me all the more grateful that he's refused to sell his talents short by making a string of mediocre thrillers. Instead, he's done his own thing so far, and although his three films haven't won him a mass audience like Tarantino, he's remained an interesting filmmaker in his own right, and We Own the Night is his best film to date.

Little Anton Ego, Ratatouille

By now most of us expect greatness from Pixar, especially when Brad Bird is directing, but like any truly great filmmaker, Bird is still capable of surprising us with his talent. Nowhere in Ratatouille is this more true than a scene near the end of the film where the dreaded food critic Anton Ego (the inimitable Peter O'Toole) drops in at Gusteau's to review the food prepared by its celebrated new chef, Remy, a rat voiced by Patton Oswalt. Counter to popular logic, Remy serves him the relatively low-class dish ratatouille, the quality of which blindsides Ego so much that he briefly flashes back to the meals of his childhood. The beauty of the moment owes largely to its brevity, as Bird executes the flashback so suddenly and in so few brush strokes that it blindsided me with its simple perfection. Rather than coming off like a cheap Freudian reading of Ego's character, this scene speaks to something more universal, and it's Ratatouille's most vivid illustration of the idea that great food truly belongs to us all.