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 INTIMATE LIGHTNING Malingering in "The Yards"' burnished rooms with James Gray
Wheel strikes rail, metal sparks. This is not a dramatic event, only a small sizzle in a subway train's progress through its fated tracery of a city. James Gray's second feature, "The Yards," is a story about several things, including corruption in the New York City transit system, but it is largely about silences between men. The inarticulate rage of the glare or the thrown punch, taken. Finding that a few steps out of bounds and you do not know the face in the mirror. The danger of sparks when you do not know you are kindling. Director James Gray follows up his intent, earnest gangster drama, "Little Odessa," with another stark, generously paced drama (written with Matt Reeves) with its story of young men seething with betrayal in working-class environs. In the weeks I've had to think about the movie, the performances of Joaquin Phoenix (as a slick young political fixer) and Mark Wahlberg (as a naive but well-intentioned ex-con), in roles that require as much coiling as unleashing, have settled into my bones. Set in Queens in an unspecified era, at one turn seeming to be the 1970s, at another, the present day, "The Yards" is a surreptitious period piece, harking as much to Visconti's "Rocco and His Brothers" as to the movies that originally starred James Caan, Faye Dunaway and Ellen Burstyn (this film's resplendent older generation). A New Yorker Talk of the Town piece appeared several weeks ago, which the 31-year-old director had been reluctant to cooperate with, dealing with family events, particularly involving his father's business, that had inspired the drama of "The Yards." Around the time he was 19, he recalls, "We were dealing with the death of my mother. She died in quite a gruesome way that necessitated constant care. At the same time, my father was focusing on business matters. He was in a partnership, not a limited partnership, which means you are held equally liable for violations of law. It's grotesquely unfair, but you don't want to say that, because it sounds like self-pity and it also sounds like bullshit. Suffice it to say, all of this stuff is what I think is in the movie and what matters." The stateliness of "The Yards" sets it apart from the kinetic output of other directors Gray's age, such as Paul Thomas Anderson. "I think the problem is that there is a real obsession with what is considered formal innovation. I feel like that's almost a product of a kind of terrible capitalist mode of thinking in which everything is product-ized and thus you must always have a 'new and improved' version of the product. In other words, no movie can be made in a traditional style. Figurative painting is another equivalent. For me, all I ever tried to do was to make a picture which was the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate feelings and impressions." Some critics find Gray's work ponderous, a word I inserted into our hyper conversation with some trepidation; I was actually more interested in the wondrously rich yet somehow unromantic look of the movie, filled with solemn, near-Technicolor shadows. It's a generous sort of sepulchral murk that never becomes gloomy or doomy. I mention a few cinematographers. "Y'know, if Gordon Willis comes [into the visual style]," he says, "it's because that's very close to the way I saw my house growing up. Maybe it's filtered through the images of 'The Godfather' and 'Klute.' Or the images of Carlo Di Palma. He laughs. "I'm a brooding fucking guy, I guess! I didn't think I was!" We also talk about the influence of Edward Hopper's sculptured strata of light, like intricate, impossible-to-light combinations of focal lengths. Yet it is Howard Shore's score, drawn at one point from Holst's "The Planets," that completes the film. There is a party where the scene's basic emotions are elevated by a drenching, but not soppy sadness. There is grandeur ascribed to their feelings, but not grandiosity. "The movie could suck, but [that music] is something I like a lot," Gray says. But a certain word still rankled. "Look, the ponderous argument is moronic. There are a lot of times when people write things about your work that do reverberate when you read them. The ponderous thing? I resent quite a bit because I feel it as though it is part and parcel of a lazy viewer. You could apply the ponderous thing to 'The Brothers Karamazov.' You could apply it to 'Throne of Blood' by Kurosawa. 'Ran' does not have a lot of fucking jokes in it. You know what I mean? They're not really interested in doing the work it takes to watch. Maybe that's just me, maybe I'm being a jerk about it. But my feeling is that if you are not willing to put in just a little work, not a lot, just a little, then you have no business judging serious films. That's for all the good things and bad things that serious implies. I make no bones about it, I like slow movies. That's another [thing you hear], 'C'mon, pick up the pace, pick up the pace!' I say, 'What is this? Movies are the equivalent of barium enemas, you want to get them over as quickly as possible?' What happened to luxuriating in the imagery and appreciating subtleties of gesture and detail?"
Also by Ray Pride TICKLE ME DEADLY
WEST IS EAST
THE FODDER OF OUR COUNTRY
HOW THE FEST WAS WON
DIRTY LOOKS & SMILES
RAGING HORMONES
THE WHITE ALBUM
IN THE COMPANY OF RENEE
VOICES CARRY
BENT
KISSER OF MEN
WINONA WEPT
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