private lives/public lives
by Douglas Messerli
Ira
Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias (screenplay), Ira Sachs (director) Love Is Strange / 2014
Most
of the nearly unanimously positive reviews of Ira Sachs’s Love Is Strange portray the film as being about a gay couple, Ben
(John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) and their relationship during a
period of time when the couple suddenly discover that they can no longer afford
their condominium and are forced to move in with others, Ben to his nephew’s
Brooklyn home where he lives with his family, and George to the nearby
apartment of two gay cops. And most critics have highly praised the film’s
portrayal of the couple’s relationship by its two leads. Los Angeles Times critic Betsy Sharkey, for example, summarizes
this critical respect: “…in the hands of two of the craft’s best, the most
ordinary of moments become illuminating, penetrating.”
In fact, I’d argue—although I’d agree that
Lithgow and Molina are both very good actors in this movie—that there are so
few moments in this film that truly reveal the nature of their actual
relationship that we have to make a great leap in simply assuming that after
more than 30 years this couple is deeply in love and barely able to survive
without each other. Only in the very few scenes—in an early gathering after
their marriage ceremony, as they joyfully sing a Broadway standard together in
their living room amongst friends; in a second scene where the two cuddle up
with other in a transitory gathering in the bunk-bed in to which Ben has been
assigned to share with his nephew’s son, Joey (Charlie Tahan); in a nearly
speechless encounter at a concert after which they joking spar about Ben’s
Romantic sensibility; and in a penultimate scene in which the two gather for a
quick drink at a Village gay bar (once a favorite of mine, Julius’ on the corner
of 10th and Waverly) during which the two briefly hint at Ben’s
occasional unfaithfulness and George’s more steady support of his companion and
his art—does the film give any evidence of what their life together might have
been like. As my husband, Howard, complained: “We don’t really get to know them
very well, do we?”
Although we do get to know a little more
about each of them than I have just suggested, we discover very little about
them as a couple, or even why they have decided to marry. Sachs leaves it to
our imagination to fill in how these two might have behaved in their “private
lives.” What we do perceive is that Ben and George are, in fact, very private
people. Neither of them— so we discern through Ben’s “lie” to the bartender
about being involved with the original protest against Julius’ original discrimination
against homosexuals—has been particularly politically active. For many long
years, George, a religious believer, has quietly taught music at a Catholic school
where, although his sexuality has been an “open secret,” he has clearly never
ruffled any sensibilities. As an artist, Ben has seemingly has spent more time
as an observer of art than as a painter whose who has been shown there—a man
who, visiting all the major galleries, has apparently lived his life dreaming
of someday being “discovered.” Although they live comfortably in their
condominium, they apparently have not been able save much for the days of
retirement (willingly in Ben’s case and enforced in George’s) which they now
face. Although they have regularly entertained in their home, their closest
friends appear to be family members and gay friends who live nearby. And
although it is apparent that those friends clearly love and enjoy the company
of this couple, they seemingly know little about just how much their separation
will affect the two, and how different their own patterns and behaviors are
from the more quiet pleasures of George and Ben. In short, they have lived an
utterly normal life that, as do so very many gay couples, they have remained
under any “cultural” radar.
These two men have lived a life not so
dissimilar to that of Howard’s and my life in which we, after 45 years of
living together, have few gay friends, living openly in a world which our
relationship does little to intrude on or question the relationships of others.
Only when the two men in the film marry,
the event that sets all the concerns of the film into motion, does their life
suddenly become “public.” And that moment changes everything, beginning with
the unstated (and by the movie unchallenged) homophobia of church doctrine, as
George is fired by the priest who has been a life-time friend. His excuse is
that of all those who shirk moral responsibility: it’s the fault of the
higher-ups—and besides, hadn’t George signed away his life by committing to the
values of the Church when he joined the teaching staff?
That decision suddenly catapults them,
living in a world of exorbitantly outrageous real estate prices, into a kind of
homelessness as they engage—as if they were embarking upon a hunt for the holy
grail—in a search for an affordable rental space, something that, as the movie
progresses, seems more and more like perusing a technical manual written in
governmental agency doubletalk.
More importantly, their sudden public
identities require that they both truly engage with others, revealing perhaps
how little we know—and as Ben, suggests, how little we really might want to know about the lives of our
friends. Although they all struggle bravely to resist hurting each other, the
family and their “life” into which Ben is thrust is fraught with filial,
marital, and simply emotional tensions, as the father Elliot (Darren Burrows),
mother Kate (Marisa Tomei), and son Joey work hard to ignore one another. Into
their silent avoidance of each other, Ben tromps in like a buffoon, disrupting
Kate’s work on her novel and Joey’s private adolescent searchings, while Elliot
continues working (vaguely as a video producer of some sort) long hours before
occasionally diving back into family life. Sharing his room with the odd
intruder, Joey is particularly flummoxed. How are you supposed to discover who
you are, intellectually and sexually, with an old gay man sharing your bunk bed
each night.
Joey has developed a rather mysterious
relationship with a slightly older friend, a Russian boy named Vlad (Eric
Tabach), an odd relationship in
Elliot’s eyes and a fascinating one from Ben’s point-of-view, who quickly makes
the whole situation more complex by Ben’s seemingly innocent recruitment of
Vlad as a model for his roof-top painting. Joey’s hostile reaction when he
discovers his friend’s temporary role seems out of proportion to any logical
emotional response. Could it be, we are led to ask, between the two boys
something sexual is going on?
We soon perceive that it is not that, but
might as well be. The two are in love, so to speak, with desire—the desire for
something outside of their temporarily closed-off lives; in this case it is a
love of all things French, including books in that language they cannot read
which Vlad has stolen from their school library. How can parents be expected to
comprehend such a complicated love as that which has suddenly obsessed these
two bright boys, binding them momentarily, in a private commitment to another
world and one another in the process? How can a distant relative possibly be
expected to help the young boy with whom he neverously sleeps each night?
Miraculously, Ben does open up the conversation to question Joey about his love
life, and gives him the permission, somehow, the boy needs to approach the
opposite sex. But Ben can have no answers, surely, for the parents who, in
their self-centered activities, appear to be destined to destroy any marital
ties they have left. Is it any wonder, living in the unstable world of such
fraught loving, that Ben falls down a flight of stairs, betraying the early
signs of a problem with his heart.
At least George’s new public life is more
transparent; but that is just the problem. Living with the two young cops who
party late into every night, George’s life has become so thoroughly public that
he has hardly any of his self left to inhabit. The pair and their friends, like
Elliot and Kate, might also be said to be uncommitted to any deep
relationships, but at least Ben can occasionally find a night of rest, whereas
George must torturously wait out their noisy evenings before he can lie down
upon their living-room couch. And it is he who first cracks, rushing off to
Brooklyn just to hold his missing mate, revealing the impossibility of living a
public life without his beloved other. Yet even within the din of noise and
meaningless partying in which few of the guests even know their hosts, George
also discovers another lost soul, a young man, Ian (Christian Coulson), who
just happens to have an inexpensive apartment to rent!
But in Sachs’s sad fable, the now public
couple’s economic salvation comes too late. Through a narrative break in time,
we discover George living in the new hospitable space, but now even more
privately than he had before, Ben having died. Joey sheepishly shows up, in
part to explain his absence from the funeral (he wanted to remember Ben, he
justifiably explains, as he had been, not as a corpse) and to deliver up a
special gift—the unfinished painting Ben had done of Vlad—a token of the past
meant, clearly, to heal the broken present. Of course, it cannot mend the tear
in George’s heart. Between that totally public roof-top encounter of the old
artist and his young model and the now quiet entombment of his surviving mate,
lies an entire unknowable world that no matter how much one tries can never be
truly bridged. Between the private and the public self, perhaps, there can be
no complete communication. That gap, between feelings and actions, between the
regretted past and the redeemable future, between troubling desire and peaceful
comfort is quietly expressed in Love Is
Strange by the boy’s extended pause in the hallway outside of Ben’s new
apartment, where he releases those built-up tensions in a gentle torrent of
tears.
A few moments later, Joey has hooked up
with a girl who obviously is his new friend, the two of them skate-boarding
into the sunset and, just possibly, into a new privately-lived golden age of
togetherness.
Los Angeles,
August 25, 2014
Reprinted
from Nth Position (September 2014).
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