I'm Still Predictable

James Gray makes movies that feel like the last movies ever made; films that were destined to be and to feel obsolete; his cinema is so good it makes virtually everyone else in Hollywood or Indiewood appear amateur. It's not that I really believe this—but I like the films so much that it's a thought that bubbles up sometimes.

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Obsolescence is part of the charm not only because Gray is making "old-fashioned" movies, or because movies like these are rare in multiplexes. His virtues are classical ones, in the bigger scheme of cinema; appreciating him is a Lukacsian endeavor rather than Brechtian. His appeal is textual, which is not to say that there aren't fascinating allusive and intertextual qualities here: for instance Two Lovers nails its loose but pungent deployments of Rear Window and Vertigo, if you ask me—the citations are neither pretenses for meta activity, nor are they banking on loaned-out gravitas. (Even if one were both cynical and unappreciative of Gray, one would be foolish to say he freeloads off of Hitchcock or any other filmmaker, for the simple reason that if he needs to appeal to older texts for weight and mythology, he feels supremely comfortable gesturing towards Greek tragedy, opera, Dostoyevsky: if it's authority and status he's after, Hitchcock is small fries...) The Hitchcock blonde is also the shiksa goddess is also the shrewd portrait of moneyed upbringing is also a specter (the final scene) is also ... i.e., Gray works all of his thematics, all his allusions, all his textual levels into a cohesive multi-layered pattern with dexterity most directors would, must, should envy.

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James Gray and whoever else was involved in casting Gwyneth Paltrow understand something essential about getting good performances from her: it is vital that one, at least in some way, works against the assumption that she is a wonderful, charming presence. Gray makes her a slightly obnoxious, loopy, fidgety rich girl and she's actually fantastic in the role. Joaquin Phoenix, too, could have delivered an insufferable performance (the role was ripe for it), but he balances all the necessary tics & mannerisms with a constant unfolding of a self—unraveling layer after layer of "character."

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"Behavioral beauties."

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And still the money flows. Constantly flowing around the edges, under the surfaces, sometimes right before our very eyes.