Pretty much every film nerd that I know fetishizes the 1970’s as the decade where the alleged pinnacle of cinematic invention was reached. Of course, this was an era when directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdonavich and Michael Cimino were essentially granted what would were considered blockbuster budgets for the time, with which they made divisive, intimately personal art films like “Taxi Driver,” “The Deer Hunter” and “The Last Picture Show”. And yet, as someone who came of age in the 1990’s, I would argue that there were a group of directors who emerged from that decade who, even if they can’t lay claim to being the first trailblazers, have come to be considered the auteurs of today. Only time will tell if their works endure to the degree that Coppola, Scorsese and company’s have, but their work is nevertheless defiantly original, throwing an assortment of post-modern inspirations into a blender and thus forging a furious and singular new collective voice in American cinema.
Quentin Tarantino is probably the most well-known and popular member of this unofficial group, though the director’s work has increasingly danced on the knife’s edge of self-parody in recent years. Ditto for Wes Anderson, whose intricately observed, jewel-box human comedies once seemed unlike anything else on the cinematic map, and have now practically become a genre unto themselves. Paul Thomas Anderson has admirably changed his style up following the coked-up, Altmanesque sturm und drang of “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia”: his last two films, the glacial, opaque “The Master” and his daffy Thomas Pynchon adaptation “Inherent Vice” are foggy, dreamlike and willfully shapeless. David O. Russel took his time finding his own very peculiar voice with a series of uneven, if intriguing indies (“Spanking the Monkey,” “Flirting with Disaster”) before storming onto the 90’s scene with the incendiary political satire “Three Kings” and later perfecting the blueprint for a kind of big-hearted, rowdy ensemble movie with “The Fighter,” “The Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle”. Even David Fincher, who is most definitely a commercial director for hire, can be considered a part of this group. Before he was the slick studio mechanic behind “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Gone Girl,” Fincher made genuinely ugly, abrasive movies like “Fight Club” and “The Game” that got all up in your face with style and bad vibes to burn. The late 90’s and early aughts was an exciting time to watch these directors work, and many of them have continued to put out challenging and substantial work in the subsequent years.
One director from this group whose work I came late to was James Gray. Gray burst onto the scene in 1996 as part of the Miramax/Sundance boom with a small-scale, modest crime drama called “Little Odessa” that starred Tim Roth as a Russian Jewish hitman returning to his native borough of Brighton Beach for some unfinished business — most of which involved his estranged father and kid brother. Watched today, “Little Odessa” definitely feels like a product of the 90’s post-Tarantino crime wave, but it’s a superior example regardless, and one that doesn’t lean too hard on Tarantino’s occasionally obnoxious knack for cinematic in-jokery. Like nearly all of Gray’s films, “Little Odessa” is acutely observed, marvelously acted and engrossing in its somber gravity. Gray has gone on to make better and more ambitious films since his rough-and-tumble debut, which he made when he was only 25, but there’s no doubt that “Little Odessa” announced the arrival of a very particular talent upon its release.
One of Gray’s most appealing qualities as a director is his commitment to classicism. It’s also one characteristic in which he notably differs from his peers. Whereas Paul Thomas Anderson recklessly combines the sprawling human tapestry of vintage Altman with Martin Scorsese’s aggressive, drugged-up melodrama, and Wes Anderson combines from the Ernst Lubitsch’s arch comedy and the romantic humanism of Francois Truffaut to create beguilingly artificial and gorgeous cinematic dioramas, Gray clearly prefers to keep it old school. He’s certainly a disciple of filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and John Ford: directors who adhered to a fairly traditional, meat-and-potatoes style of directing (only recently has the elder Coppola dabbled into experimental waters). The closest precedent I can think of for Gray, though, is the great New York director Sidney Lumet. Like Lumet, Gray has an instinctual feel for the city that’s as lived-in and effortless as Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee. He breathes in its toxic fumes, relishes its shitty corner bodegas and intimately knows the ecstatic charge of a Manhattan nightclub. Gray is also, like Lumet, someone who is interested in the moral drama inherent in the DNA of of the classic crime film. Watch “Serpico” or “Prince of the City” and you will see traces of Gray’s doomy classicism in every painterly frame.
Gray’s second and third films are his most openly Lumet-esque. “The Yards” is a tense, quiet crime yarn that flips the dynamic of Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” — a levelheaded street kid and his apoplectic best friend — into something solemn and silently explosive. “The Yards” was also the first of Gray’s collaborations with actor Joaquin Phoenix, who has since starred in almost every film of the director’s to date. Phoenix was the unpredictable id of “The Yards” and he played a similar character in “We Own The Night,” a crackerjack gangster picture whose title is taken from the official police slogan used by the NYPD at the height of the 80’s crack-cocaine epidemic. Phoenix’s character in that film — a nightclub owner with ties to the Russian mob whose entire family serves on the police force — was, like many of Gray’s protagonists, being pulled between the darkness and the light. “Soon, one day, you’ll either be with us, or you’ll be with the gangsters,” the character is told by his hardass of a father (Robert Duvall, playing an entire era as much as he is playing one man) in one pivotal scene. It’s a fitting encapsulation of the dilemma Gray loves to explore: the choice of surrender versus salvation, the question of resisting superficial pleasures versus the risk of oblivion.
Gray’s next film was a bit of a left turn, even for those who had been following his career up until that point. For starters, “Two Lovers” — a painful Brighton Beach romance starring Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw — was the first of Gray’s films that didn’t qualify, in one way or another, as a crime picture. It’s also Gray’s most nakedly personal film, and one can sense the liberty he must have felt being lifted from the restrictions of genre. Phoenix once again stars as a wounded man named Leonard who tried to kill himself once, failed, and has been living in a quiet cycle of shame ever since. The movie proceeds to trace, with a novelist’s depth of observation and a wealth of sensual visual details, Leonard’s sort-of romances with two very different women. The first is a stable young woman whom shy, sweet Leonard meets through his parents. The second is his beautiful, drug-addicted neighbor, played by Paltrow in one of her most revealing performances. The film lacks the spastic bursts of violence and Mamet-esque tough guy dialogue that marked “The Yards” and “Little Odessa,” but the blighted Brighton Beach environs and rich vein of Russian Jewish history remain. The film was also significant for introducing audiences to Gray’s now-identifiable propensity for melodrama: a predisposition that blossomed into a full-on obsession in his most recent film, the gloomy period epic “The Immigrant”.
The Weinstein Company’s dreadful and negligent marketing of of Gray’s sumptuous New American classic was one of the cinematic low points of 2014. Few films of that year could match “The Immigrant” — the brutal, balletic tale of a Polish émigré, played with characteristic luminous grace by Marion Cotillard, who falls under the thumb of a shadowy, charismatic pimp in 1920’s New York City — for sheer mood and atmosphere, not to mention thematic scope. Here is a film that not only tips its hats to the mid-century masterworks of Elia Kazan (“On the Waterfront”) and Sergio Leone (“Once Upon a Time in America”) but also deserves to be mentioned in that same very rarified company. Gray’s fifth film is inarguably his masterwork, and may very well be dissected by film scholars some time down the line as both a handsome homage to the golden-era classics the director no doubt devoured as a child, and also a sly and loving rebuke of the same. In a way, “The Immigrant” is the most postmodern thing Gray’s ever made. It’s all there in the performance of Phoenix as the tormented pimp Bruno, a character who might have seemed to be a one-note, contemptible coward in the hands of a more predictable actor. In Phoenix’s volatile screen persona, Gray summons the same kind of uncontained id that Martin Scorsese did in his best collaborations with former leading man Robert Deniro.
Gray’s next film sounds like it’s going to be his most ambitious to date. It’s a sprawling tale of colonial exploration and madness at the hands of nature, something that sounds like “Heart of Darkness” by way of “Fitzcarraldo”. It’s called “The Lost City of Z,” and it’s to be produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Productions, with “Sons of Anarchy” leading man Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson and Sienna Miller set to star. The trailer bears a more Oscar-friendly, polished vision of Gray’s typical directorial stamp than can be seen in the more hard-edged likes of “The Yards,” and it will be interesting to see Gray, who is a famously demanding actor’s director, push the commanding but often leaden Hunnam to his outer limits. Being Gray’s second foray into period drama, the film’s awards-friendly festival screenings are a (broad) portent of things to come, but one thing is for certain: any year that we get a new James Gray movie is indeed a good year. He may not bear the same name brand recognition as directors like Wes Anderson and David Fincher, but in this writer’s opinion, he is every bit their equal and it will be a treat and a privilege to see how his career unfolds from this point on.
