NEW YORK TO L.A.
My aim in painting has always been the
most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature. – Edward Hopper, “Notes on Painting”
(1933)
I’ll put it lightly: America has never been the best at recognizing its greatest artists. I’m not going to take the time to list them all because we’d be here all day, but suffice it to say that more than a few careers have stuttered, stalled, or completely sputtered out because of the neglect and/or negative response they received from American cultural commentators, critics, audiences, whoever. In the realm of cinema, especially, it’s almost become a running joke that if one really wants to know who the best filmmakers in America are, one should paradoxically look across the pond—to see what the French are saying. Hitchcock, Hawks, Lewis, Eastwood, you name it: people who were seen as (read: dismissed as) purely commercial artists in America were seen in France as the epochal artists that they were and are. It has taken many years for these exotic opinions to find footing in America, and in some decades-old cases are still seen as a bit fanatical if not flat out absurd. I guess it’s something in the air. This has given rise to the fact that, when talking about certain filmmakers, any positive writing on them has to be—de facto—a defense.
This was the case with James Gray for a long time. It wasn’t until fifteen years into his career that most American critics started to see him as anything more than a derivative genre filmmaker. But the French had seen it right away: the moment Little Odessa entered the world in the mid-90s they knew that a major talent had been born, and they continued to recognize it each time Gray was able to make another film. Of course, all of this is full of generalities, which I will now cease spouting: many perceptive individuals, in America and all over the world, saw Gray’s talents for what they were far earlier than when the mainstream critical tide shifted sometime around the onset of the second decade of the 21st century. Even so, two years into the third decade of the century, I would argue that Gray is still immensely underappreciated—especially relative to other filmmakers of his generation, who gobble up critical and audience attention while Gray remains more or less on the sidelines. Fellow ‘90s-debuting directors like Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson have entered the mainstream or alt-mainstream as brand names; James Gray remains unfashionable, unsexy, and unknown—don’t expect to throw around his name without being asked for clarification as to just what films he’s made, exactly.
And while those filmmakers have been lavished with the honor of multiple publications dedicated to their work, Gray’s quarter-century career has gone all but unremarked upon in the realm of longform writing. Only one book about James Gray has ever been published in English, and that only as a dual English-French language book of interviews with Gray and his collaborators: Jordan Mintzer’s Conversations with James Gray (2012). It’s a very informative and edifying book, but beyond the interviews and miscellaneous production materials throughout the well-designed hardback, the only real writing—actual criticism—comes in the form of a short preface by legendary French critic Jean Douchet, “The Art of Thought.” (What’s billed as an “Introduction” by Francis Ford Coppola is really just a two-page layout of a handful of banal quotes in very large font.) The only other publications about Gray I’m aware of are two foreign works: a German book James Gray: Der filmische Raum zwischen Nähe und Distanz (2012) and a French book James Gray: Livret de famille (2015), both anthology-type works of various critics having a go at Gray’s films.[1]
As an American, however, I always feel somewhat embarrassed when other countries are forced to do the work of appreciating our own artists because we’re neglecting the job. So this project on James Gray is my little attempt to do just that: to not only reclaim Gray as an American great and not just a French one, but also to reclaim the task of thinking and writing about him—all from his own national backyard, finally. It’s taken long enough: Gray can no longer be said to be in the beginning of his career, now aged 53, and has given us more than enough films—making up in quality what he may have lost to quantity—to provide ample springboard for the discussion of films and filmmaker. I’m well aware that this project will—nay, already has—become outmoded by the premiere and imminent release of Gray’s newest film, Armageddon Time, which was shot and finished during the time it took to bring this project to completion. As with any text, the passing of time sheds more and more context, proving some things to be more on-the-mark than could have been known and revealing others to be comically far off base. But the writing of this text now, in the middle of Gray’s career, feels to me not just tolerable but necessary: one need not wait until an artist is dead to claim them as the great artist they are, and in fact it is one’s right—dare I say responsibility—to do just that. (The idea that an artist or their art must “stand the test of time” before being declared truly great is, to me, a big pile of steaming rubbish; while we’re waiting, artists are dying.) Somebody has to make a gesture that puts Gray’s films in the proper perspective, as the masterpieces they are—it might as well be me.
The conception of this project began as partly practical and
partly idealistic. Personal life situations led me to the point of wanting,
needing, something to focus on creatively; why not, I thought, embark on the
biggest writing project I had ever embarked upon, and make the subject of that
project one of the most important artists, to me personally, of my lifetime
(that is, someone who I cared about enough to sustain many months of in depth
thinking about without either hitting bottom or becoming bored.) You may have
noticed that you’re reading this on a very cheap-looking WordPress blog, even
though I’ve been acting as though this is some kind of legitimate publication:
The Very First English Language Book of Longform Criticism on James Gray That
Has Ever Been. I did indeed begin this endeavour with the vague but
concrete-enough idea of writing a book—a book book. About halfway
through, around the time that I switched from research mode to actual writing
mode, I started questioning that idea for a number of reasons both life-related
and aesthetics-related. (I even dedicated a rare blogpost to working through my
concerns over that issue, which I’m not going to link but if you really care that
much can be found somewhere on this site.) Long story short, I decided that I
didn’t care about having the prestige of having written an “actual” book, nor
did I want to go through the effort of attempting to publish it—something I
know close to zero about doing, and figured would be a longshot anyway. I
decided instead to publish it on my blog; all of a sudden, a whole new world of
freedom opened up to me that wasn’t there when I was worrying about coloring in
the lines of what I saw as “proper” for a book. I traded in the desired
perfection of my writing (hard, boring) for the chaos of my scribbling (easier,
more fun). I would be able to incorporate images of all kinds. I would be able
to do anything I wanted to do, with absolutely no oversight of any kind. For
example, I could
simply
do
this
........
and just leave it, if I wanted to, because I can. Plus, my utopian itch would be scratched: it would be available for everyone to read, accessible for free by the click of a button. (Also, this being a beautifully unofficial blogpost rather than a boringly official book, I was able to abandon the need to care about citations; I hope you can simply trust me, human to human, that I didn’t make up any of the information or quotes that appear here.[2])
__
The odd thing with this whole project, however, is that in some ways it feels like a betrayal. It’s ironic—relative to all of the current filmmakers I like, Gray’s films don’t really inspire me to speech. They’re too deep, they’re too emotional, they’re too personal; a more honest mode of critical reflection would maybe be to simply show you a jar of tears that I’ve collected from my viewings and call it a day.
Francis Vogner dos Reis:
Let’s start by committing a critical heresy (according to some): James Gray’s films don’t offer “discussion,” but “offer themselves.” This can only be said because James Gray is one of those filmmakers who stimulate, God knows how, a shortcut in our perception that directly affects our emotions, which stimulates a sensitivity that is not just a sensory pleasure (let’s leave that to the new age filmmakers), that calls us to our senses, just to place us immediately—in the next scene—back on the brink of the abyss.
Or as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky says in the comment section of a late 2000s era blog post about Gray: “But the films, maybe, are too strong. I can write words, but they seem empty compared to the films.” I can only hope that the words that I forced out of my brain—a purging of many years worth of musings, intellectual and emotional—might capture at least a small little bit of what the films themselves powerfully express. (And reading my work back to myself, as this preface was the last thing I wrote, I can assure you that I came far short of expressing the true depths of what I have felt about these films; if at any point it happens to seem like I have, that only goes to show how deep this really goes.) However if nothing else, as the first prolonged look at Gray’s work in English this series will serve as a kind of encyclopedic catalogue of all available and relevant information about Gray and his films, which in their current form lie scattered across hundreds of websites, on DVD special features, and in the occasional book or magazine. I’ve done my best to present, as far as I am able, an organized accounting of all this chaos.
Amidst everything, from small details of trivia to what are to me
the emotional cores of the films, I’ve tried to veer on the side of the
personal. If the very existence of this project doesn’t give this fact away,
I’ll spell it out for you: James Gray’s films mean a lot to me. The closest
thing to a watershed moment between me and cinema came just a year or two into
my cinephilia, when I was 18, when I watched The Yards off of MUBI while
lying in my bed with my laptop. Before that point, I had never, ever cried
watching a movie; near the end of The Yards, however, the floodgates
opened, and it was revealed to me for the very first time just what kind of
emotional power it was possible for movies to have. It’s six years later,
almost to the date, that I’m writing these lines (the same distance in time
between the releases of Gray’s first and second films). In a twist of fate, I
started this project at the same age Gray started filming Little Odessa, and
shortly after the last part of this project is released I will be turning the
same age that Gray was when Little Odessa premiered.
__
James Gray is a notoriously generous interviewee, and as he’s made
the rounds promoting his films he’s left us with a gigantic pile of interviews
to sift through. (And DVD commentaries, even though he doesn’t like doing them
because he doesn’t like to “explain” his films; he merely comes in, talks
extemporaneously for two hours as his film plays, and leaves.) He’s very
perceptive of his own work, which presents a challenge to the person writing
about it: not to rely on his own words too much. But they’re there, and I use
them, and I try to grab what’s useful and then not worry too much about staying
close to the line he draws of himself—after all, he himself tells us that once
his films have been released, they’re no longer his, but ours. Having spent
hours and hours sifting through all the printed or recorded words available out
of the mind and mouth of James Gray—where anecdote after anecdote is often
repeated time and time again, as is the nature of these things—there were points
where I wanted nothing more than to tune out everything he was saying so I
could get down to thinking, i.e. hearing from my own head, some actually new
thoughts. Not just bored, at times I was annoyed; while Gray can be very
entertaining to listen to, his schtick sometimes gets old, and a number of his
common pronouncements throughout the years are things I disagree with—or not
disagree with, so much as present an attitude that I find unhelpful, that is
without the kind of nuance I’m looking for. So I assure you this is far from a
hagiographical project. I’m here to merely be edified by the films and what
lies beyond them....
__
In his voluminous body of interviews and commentaries and what-have-you, Gray is very forthcoming about who he does and does not rip off. When it comes to influence and inspiration, Gray doesn’t deny that he’s been influenced and inspired; much of his work refers to work done before him. To some, these references make him a pastiche artist. But at the end of the day, there is no sense that his inspirations or references are only that; rather, everything that is put onto the screen feels like a total creation and reflection of Gray and his emotions and his thoughts and his life. Some of it is conscious, much of it is subconscious—either way, all this does, really, is place Gray in a long line of tradition, a part of the continuum of art history. As we’ll see, any copying of his cinematic forebears results not in any kind of wholesale borrowing, but in a new style altogether: being the specific individual that he is, and not the filmmakers that he’s been influenced by, he can only ever fail at reproducing what made them who they were or are—but from the fissures and gaps created by that failure there arises a style that is pure Gray. And once you realize that many—I would even say the majority—of Gray’s influences are non-cinematic, you begin to see that none of this is just stealing or borrowing but something deeper: the superimposition of multiple arts and their attendant metaphysics. Coppola once wrote to Gray saying that he was glad to have inspired him, that it was fine to steal his stuff because “that’s what it’s there for.” But as far as Gray is a cinephile director, one can easily get lost in a game of spot-the-influence while neglecting to spot the film itself that is in front of one. I don’t want to have the mentioning of other titles in relation contribute to that shortsightedness, but I also can’t neglect what seems to me the very important fact that every film in the history of cinema exists in a context that includes every other film in the history of cinema. Therefore, if reference to those films can in some way be beneficial to the film under discussion, then why not reference them? The point of references is not to offer some kind of shallow trivia, but to widen and enliven as much as possible the playing field on which one engages with the films.
A coincidence of chronology thought it may be, that Gray’s first feature film is made and shown almost exactly a century from the first public showings of cinema doesn’t mean nothing: for here is an artform which has been shaped and molded, by the artists that have existed along this timeline, into it’s present state—not a linear development of progress, but an impossibly complex layering of artistic innovation and borrowing. Just as Gray’s social situation, familial circumstances, even date of birth play a part in determining who he is and will be as a person, so too every single film that Gray has watched up to this point, every painting he has seen, every book he has read, every piece of music he has heard: the point is that these things don’t simply exist to be borrowed or picked from willy-nilly as though one were choosing candy in a candy shop. We are inescapably marked—in impossibly complex and ultimately unknowable ways—by the things we consume, consciously or not (usually not), and they become a part of us. Therefore, to “steal” from a film or filmmaker that has come before is, from one angle, a simple act of copying and pasting; but from another angle, it is nothing less than the expression of one’s personhood through the medium of what one knows and consumes and loves and was and is effected by in some small or large way. In art, stealing or borrowing can simply (at least for true artists) be called expressing—that it was somebody else’s before it was one’s own hardly matters for the one who is expressing it if it is truly an expression of that person. Ideas and moods belong to no one in particular, and everybody in general. It is in some ways merely picking out of the basket of all human ideas and feelings of all time, a well of common use, and utilizing these in the communication of one’s own inner emotions. And anyway—nothing is new under the sun. The only thing new is the person expressing themselves through them. And James Gray is new....
....and yet at the same time he is old. Much has been made of the fact that Gray can be lumped in with a certain tradition in narrative filmmaking that for lack of a better word has been termed “classical.” While in one sense true, it’s an arbitrary term that can be flipped on its head if one wants, as Jean Douchet does here:
Many will deem such a style classical, but I find it to be the opposite. For, modernity in cinema is less about inventing something new—an idea which has obsessed Hollywood for the last few decades—than about returning to the past to build upon cinema’s foundations. The films of James Gray, both in their thought and expression, are classic works which reinvent our conception of classicism. They are, therefore, entirely modern.
Gray resists the notion, too, but forced to define it for himself he defines it this way: “All the classical format really means, to me, is: take your own ego out of the equation. It’s all about you, but the style is not about you.” Rather than being seen as some kind of adherence to conservative filmmaking opposed to innovation and originality, I think it’s our job to try and grasp just what makes this particular style of filmmaking possess the qualities that it does. James Gray has chosen—or it has chosen him—a certain style. Call it what you like: classical, traditional, narrative, whatever. This is but one kind of style of many, obviously, but this obvious fact bears mentioning because, although the viewer may not agree with Gray that it is necessarily the best style, I believe it is, however, the responsibility of the viewer to try and grasp, as intimately as possible, the reasons for this preference and the particular profundity contained in this particular style, whatever that may be.
As a director, he has reduced his style to the essential—to the frame as the purest expression of his thought. It’s the style that was born with Griffith, then developed by Murnau, and finally perfected by John Ford: if one is not in the frame, one does not exist. There is no hors-champ, no world beyond the limits of the frame, and the more he progresses, the more James Gray utilizes the frame and the frame only as a narrative tool. – Jean Douchet
The case of James Gray is fascinating: it's as if he went beyond this last stage of classical dramaturgy to point out a further path not nearly as explored, as it had been by the Japanese, or by Pialat and Gérard Blain in France, by Comencini, Olmi, and Zurlini in Italy, and in the United States by Ray, Cimino, and Cassavetes. Revealing itself through nakedness, classicism becomes the very atmosphere of the film. The splendor of presence that so well characterizes classic works is reached, but the mise-en-scène is no longer organized by gesture: the nuances and complexities of the characters surpass the manner in which the film seeks to produce them through gestures and actions. – Felipe Medeiros
So James Gray exists on the timeline of a certain tradition of
classical narrative cinema. And as fewer and fewer filmmakers find themselves
as part of this timeline, Gray may be seen as a kind of last torch-bearer in
this lineage. Throw whatever names you want in there before him: Griffith,
Murnau, Ford, Walsh, Chaplin, Vidor, Hitchcock, Hawks, Lang, Tourneur, Dwan, Coppola,
Ray, Preminger, Losey, Lupino, Wilder, Fuller, Peckinpah, Cimino, Carpenter,
Eastwood, Spielberg.... and that’s just cherry-picking from the American cinema.
Each of these filmmakers draw from the same well in one way or another; but to
watch and study them individually is to see how each twists the tradition to
their own will and uses it as the backbone of their personal art. The outer
shell may appear similar, but it's the inner vision which ultimately imprints
itself on the viewer. To end this little introduction with a quote from the
same artist who opened it: “Great art is the outward expression of an inner
life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of
the world.”
__
what man, what mortal, may boast himself born / to a life that is safe from the slings of Fate? – Agamemnon, Aeschylus
James Marshall Gray, born April 14, 1969. Queens, New York City, New York, USA. An era and environment that will shape Gray into who he is; an obvious statement, as no one is exempt from the forces of where and when one is born, but worth mentioning for a future filmmaker who will so thoroughly make those forces felt in his work, elevating them from casual facts into something like the central themes of his filmography.
The mood of the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience, the socio-political atmosphere of ‘70s and ‘80s New York under mayor Ed Koch, the pathos of a certain working-class melancholia. Gray lived in the north-central portion of Queens called Flushing (“like the toilet,” as he says), a place like the “desolate, screwed-up dump” of the Coney Island shown in The Warriors (1979) or the New York depicted as a “giant garbage can” in The French Connection (1971). For an attractive view, the young Gray could only look out of his bedroom window at the Manhattan skyline nine miles away—which might as well have been 9000.
A perfect location for the family’s class-consciousness to fester inside their semi-attached row house in “Archie Bunker land.” Gray’s parents were both descendants of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, but the two sides of the family didn’t speak—his mother’s side more educated, middle-class; his father’s side lower-class, with a deeper sense of history. His mother was a home economics teacher at Queens College, his father a professor at the New York Institute of Technology who later tried his hand at a number of business ventures, most notably as a supplier of electronic subway parts for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (a venture which would end in scandal, the milieu and events of which form the subject of Gray’s second feature, The Yards). The final member of the Gray family was an older brother named Edward, now an intensive-care physician, the other half of a “textured” fraternal relationship that has its place in Gray’s cinema of emotional autobiography as much as either parent does.
Gray’s childhood interests mainly took on an artistic bent—painting, cinema, books, music. Drawing lessons were arranged by his parents, and his first dream was of becoming a painter. An introduction to the great painters courtesy of his maternal grandmother; a coffee table book of Edward Hopper paintings at his great aunt’s house.
Early landmarks of a life-changing reorientation around the arts came via retrospectives of Pablo Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art and Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980:
The paintings exploded with vitality. It’s impossible to relate the emotion that I felt; it seemed to burst out of the frame. I was forced, as a ten or eleven-year-old boy, forced to confront directly what the work was saying to me; directly.
Gray’s career as a painter would be on the screen rather than the canvas (although he still paints recreationally[3]); his subsequent obsession with filmmaking would be less of an abandonment of painting then a sublimation of that particular art—after sensing its limitations—into a combination of that form and others: painting, dance, photography, theatre, music, all things he found interesting and all things the cinema contained within itself.
Gray’s interest in the medium went from hobby to passion in the third week of August, 1979: Apocalypse Now at the Ziegfeld Theatre, a shot to the solar plexus, and perhaps the single most life-changing experience of Gray’s artistic life. Gray dates his introduction to true cinephilia the year after with the release of Raging Bull (1980), after which he started seeing everything he could, wherever he could see it—revival cinemas, television, VHS rentals, etc. By 1982 he was going to the movies (often double features) around four or five times a week; by Gray’s own admission he spent his “entire adolescence” sitting in a movie theatre. The web of cinematic history had opened up: from Coppola the discovery of Visconti, from Scorsese the discovery of Bertolucci. Kubrick, Polanski, Kurosawa, Fellini, Hitchcock (the famed 1983 re-release of five films leading to Gray’s first uncomprehending and subsequent obsessive viewings of Vertigo after it had cast its spell on him).
An indifferent and underperforming student, Gray was tested with an eye towards putting him in a special school, but high scores instead led his parents to place him in the Queens prep school Kew-Forest. There, Gray’s cinematic interests were nurtured by French teacher Daniel Horgan and Latin teacher Christopher Spelman, the latter of which becomes an important recurring character in Gray’s story as a musical advisor and composer. The three started a film club along with some other students. Trips to Manhattan revival houses, post-film discussions at teenager-friendly establishments, and commentary from Spelman about the narrative tradition and the way filmmakers worked on the unconscious offered Gray nothing less than a full education in thinking about movies as art.
Spelman: From the very first time that I met him, when he was a student, he stood out as somebody with a huge personality; very, very funny, but also, for a kid, more passionate about movies than really anybody I’ve met subsequently has been passionate about anything.... He was so focused as a kid, and so full of creative energy. But really it was the focus, he was incredibly knowledgeable at his age, he was making films.... Honestly I feel like you could tell when he was young he was going to accomplish something, that he would stand out in some way.
While at Kew-Forest Gray also received an introduction to the classics: Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, the Bible. It’s to this period that Gray traces his discovery of tragedy and his fascination with family relationships.
Gray’s interest in music takes an interesting arc. In the 1980s he was embedded at a young age in New York’s clubbing and music scenes, frequenting places like Studio 54 and Danceteria. He was also into punk, slam dancing with friends at CGBG; The Clash, along with The Beatles, seem to be Gray’s two touchstone rock acts. More “sophisticated” tastes followed: Miles Davis and jazz at 17 (apparently prompted by a girl he liked), and then in his 20s classical music and opera—easily the defining discovery, music-wise, for Gray’s filmmaking career, partially brought on by an encounter with Franco Zeffirelli’s film of La Traviata (1982) at age 20 (“A shock. I was thunderstruck by the music.”), whose star, soprano Teresa Stratas, would later be considered for the Vanessa Redgrave role in Little Odessa.
Gray was sent to summer day camp in 1981 to learn computing, but what caught his interest wasn’t the morning programming classes but the afternoon filmmaking ones; he spent much of the camp perfecting his masterpiece based on a Robert Bloch short story casted with fellow 12-year-olds playing policemen. His teenage years were spent obsessively making short films on Super 8 (and later video, because it allowed the editing of sound). These were mostly special effects driven with stop-motion animation, or later serial killer stories, horror movies, and crime films. Gray even took a job handing out leaflets on the corner for Lafayette Electronics to pay for equipment, allowing him to buy a video camera and a portable VCR deck to record onto directly. He later had some kind of job at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens and witnessed Gordon Willis working on the set of The Money Pit (1986). The famed cinematographer’s commitment to craft would be a big inspiration of Gray’s (not to mention the large visual influence Willis’ work would have on the look of Gray’s movies to come—some nice historical foreshadowing there.)
Pursuing filmmaking seemed like a risk if not a downright mistake to Gray’s parents; his father still wanted him to go into computers, a growth industry that would lead to a stable career, but Gray had no interest in it. He had his eye on film school, the places where one generation before many of the core New Hollywood filmmakers had filed out of. Gray got accepted to USC, but he didn’t want to go—he had mistakenly thought that Coppola had gone there when he had actually gone to UCLA. But the scholarship money wasn’t to be turned down, so that’s where he left for in the fall of 1987. Gray’s mistake was exacerbated when he got there and learned that much of the program was conducted in a Spielberg/Lucas kind of mold which, whatever its merits, was “not at all where I was coming from.”
To a major in film production was added, a year later, a double major in critical studies. Gray’s knowledge of film history and the sheer quantity of films he had seen set him apart, for better or worse; a certain youthful arrogance and pretentiousness was definitely in play, as admitted by Gray and others—close friend and future Ad Astra co-writer Ethan Gross “didn’t like him at first in school, because he was a know-it-all, and loud.”
Prior to his student thesis film, there are two other student
shorts that we have (very limited) knowledge of. His 290 short, which may or
may not have been called Property Settlement Agreement, is shown in
Mintzer’s book[4],
and appears to be a brief film about child custody. Gray’s 310 student
short was called Territorio (1990), an eight minute video without
synchronized dialogue about homeless people fighting for territory.[5] But the film that would
eventually launch his future career in the movies was his 480 thesis film, Cowboys
and Angels (1991), a twelve minute short shot on 16mm. The 480 Advanced
Productions class at USC involved the collaboration of a writer, a director,
and a small crew of about seven other people. Gray read around 25 scripts and
chose one with a genre hook, but according to film school friend Matt Reeves he
“riffed on it so wildly that it had nothing to do with the original
screenplay.” Not all school instructions were followed, but the risk payed
off—eventually. Showing the dailies to Edward Dmytryk, former Hollywood
filmmaker and chair of USC’s film department at the time, Gray was earning his
admiration right up until a scene containing nudity (against both the rules and
Dmytryk’s sensibilities). The film was given an F, but Gray appealed the grade,
was given an A, and the film went on to be a hit at the USC student film
screening First Look.
__
On Cowboys and Angels (1991)
For all of it’s modesty as a film school short, the film certainly displays the stirrings of a gifted filmmaker. It’s a trademark James Gray film avant la lettre: chiaroscuro lighting, attention to detailed character work, a camera that doesn’t go crazy and a desire to reach, by film’s end, some kind of knotty truth about the world. At the same time it’s only twelve minutes, so the short film format plays against Gray’s strengths as a filmmaker of deliberate pacing. The cutting is more rapid; you sense that Gray wants to linger but can’t; he has to get where he’s going, narratively, but the quickness still can’t dispel a mounting realization that the narrative is heading to an endpoint that’ll deliver the goods (and it does).
The essence of the story: a private investigator (played by Jace Kent, who as a private running joke was given blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit parts in Gray’s first two features) is sent to collect a runaway daughter and bring her back to her father. As in all subsequent Gray films, the external conflict is ultimately replaced by an internal one: the father that he returns the girl to is abusive, and he sees it. The question of whether to just do his job and move on or to pursue his stirrings of higher ethical responsibility becomes the knot at the film’s center, simply but strikingly visualized toward the end of the film by a man and a telephone in a low lit room; he picks it up, dials social services, but hangs up—“fuck it,” he says. A final cutaway to a shot of the girl’s eyes poetically solidifies the haunted feeling both character and viewer are left with.
It’s flashier than anything Gray has done since, and a Scorsese comparison
becomes inevitable given a soundtrack filled with the likes of Bo Diddley,
Billie Holliday, and the Dave Brubeck Quartet that give the film a certain
bounce separating it from the rest of the film school short crowd (and which
subsequent Gray works will almost entirely do away with); Gray contributes most
of the film’s relative success to his avoidance of tacky Casiotone scoring
techniques common to student films of the era. More flash points come courtesy
of a sex scene between Kent and his girlfriend in the film (Gray’s chosen use
of the scene required to be filmed on a stage) that begins as a Caravaggian
composition of pale bodies stretching against a tenebrae background before it
tips over into fantasy when the background becomes Kent’s memory of the strip
club in which he found the runaway earlier that day.
It’s a scene reminiscent of Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981), not just for its stage-bound antics via cinematic effects but for its playfulness with thought and memory and sex; it quickly communicates a distance in intimacy between the characters that foreshadows similar scenes in both Little Odessa and The Yards.
Gray has basically disowned the film as a cheesy, unsubstantive film school short (“I made this stupid little movie, I thought it was crap”), and it’s basically been buried in film history; it is, however, most assuredly a James Gray film. Which is to say, it is not without tenderness and beauty and truth....
[1] A third book, Benjamin Flores’ Le cinéma
néoclassique hollywoodien (2018), perhaps deserves mention if not for its
inclusion of Gray amidst other neoclassical Hollywood directors like Mann,
Eastwood, Spielberg, Fincher, Coppola, or De Palma, then for its Two Lovers
cover art.
[2] And if you really care to know where some particular thing came
from, just ask. My email is collinbrinkmann20@gmail.com or you can DM me on
Twitter, either of which you can use to ask about sources or literally anything
else that you may have reason, or no reason at all, to ask me about. I’m just a
guy on the internet.
[3] “I’m not a good painter. The reason I never became a painter is I’m
not a talented person. I have technical skill. I have that talent in other
words if you said to me, ‘paint that silver coffee pot,’ I could do it
realistically in canvas and oil, but that’s not what a good painter is.”
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