ALFRED MOLINA AND JOHN LITHGOW IN LOVE IS STRANGE

Vicissitudes of gay marriage

While Ira Sachs' last movie, Keep the Lights on, dealt with the ten years of a painfully dysfuctional and doomed gay relationship, his new one, his most mainstream-friendly and probably most successful yet, goes quite the other way. Love Is Strange focuses on two men who've lived in harmony for just ages. To start thing off on the right track, they're played by two actors who are about as good as it gets. As George and Ben, Alfred Molina and John Lithgow, longtime friends in real life, make their on screen relationship look and feel as warm, loving, and lived in as has ever been seen in movies about gay men. The movie opens with George and Ben huddled together comfortably in a bed that isn't large. They get up like any old couple, fussy, a bit preoccupied, as if the day is nothing special. But it is. It's their wedding day, because after 39 years together they've decided in New York City to tie the knot officially. Such a ceremony is both moving and a bit pro-forma, acknowledging something that's well known to everyone around them, giving them a welcome chance to celebrate publicly, at an after party in their comfy apartment among friends and neighbors, a union whose solidity and love their straight friends may well envy. But ironically, things go bad from here on.

Everything about the specifics of this film is convincing and enjoyable to watch from scene to scene. Sachs is in full command of craft and lucky in more than just Lithgow and Molina, though except for the coolly intense young Charlie Tahan as Jerry, son of a close relative of Ben's, and the astonishingly specific Marisa Tomei as Jerry's novelist mom, most of the cast are underused. As for the larger outlines, though Sachs and his co-writer Mauricio Zacharias (who also collaborated on Keep the Lights On) deliver a rich sense of milieu and leave the actors room to improvise, one may question the credibility of the trajectory, or its necessity, or wonder what it's supposed to mean. Surely not that gay marriage, so much striven for by activists, is only a source of pain? Nonetheless, though the action gets a bit too weepy, gushy, or fatalistic at moments, it is a continual pleasure to see American almost-mainstream filmmaking this textured, mature, and real.

In the event, George, the breadwinner (Ben is a painter who may be good but isn't a big success), loses his job very soon after the marriage ceremony. He teaches music and directs the choir at a Catholic school whose headmaster is forced to let him go when his now official homosexuality gains the attention of the diocese. Faced with this cutoff of funds and the cruel demands of New York City real estate Ben and George feel obliged, against the protests of their coop partners and friends, to sell their apartment immediately and at a terrible (and almost preposterous) loss.

While George searches frustratingly for work and the couple look into the tricky prospects of a cheap place to rent, they find free interim lodging apart, George with a rowdy young gay couple in their building who're both cops (Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez), who George calls "the policewomen"; Ben with his work-obsessed nephew Elliot (Darren Burrows) and his novelist wife Kate (Tomei). Ben proceeds to drive Kate nuts with his friendly but pointless chatter (these scenes take a bit long to make their point), and his kipping in the bottom bunk in son Joey's room (Tahan) is a huge annoyance to this teenage boy, whose relatiohnship with his new and only friend Vlad (Eric Tabach) may be more than meets the eye. The only significant subplot is Joey's troubled and uncertain story, as such a boy's might be in real life, leaving us hanging as to whether for Joey Vlad is love or obsession or simply the dangerous and tempting friendship of a lonely kid. Ben is exiled to Brooklyn with his nephew's family, but the roof of the apartment building provides a pretty urban landscape view, and when he finally relaxes, leaves Kate to finish her novel, and takes up the brush again, it's to paint Vlad posing in singlet with skateboard in front of Manhattan skyline on that roof.

It's surprising how much danger and complexity and emotional depth Sachs & Co. draw from these little events. A New York story to the core, Love Is Strange could have the subtitle, And Real Estate is Brutal. Ben and George are a New York couple. They will not move upstate, however available employment and cheaper housing might be there. Of course if they'd done so, or just found a double mattress to share somewhere, none of this would have happened. Some of the action, despite the lovely, precise observation of behavior, seems off kilter or slightly wrong. But we'll remember Lithgow and Molina together, and apart, in just this way forever now.

For more background and social perspective, see Armond White's review for Out ("Love Is Strange teaches respect for gay elders").

Love Is Strange, 94 mins., debuted at Sundance, January 2014, showing at a dozen or so international festivals. Released by Sony Pictures Classics in rolling-out limited release, it entered theaters 22 August 2014. Watched for this review at Landmark Shattuck Cinemas, Berkeley, California when it opened in the Bay Area 29 August.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.