Film Review: Love is Strange *** 1/2
Art, in any medium, attempts to recreate life so that the audience suspends their disbelief and enters into the art as if it were real. However, as many critics always remind us, art is not life. There are usually moments where the curtain is pulled, where a movie veers into a cliché plot point, where an actor drops character that reminds us we are merely watching a story. That is what makes Love is Strange a quiet and profound movie. It has been a really long time since I have felt a movie was actually taken from life.
Love is Strange will unfortunately have the “ripped from the headlines” or “an issue movie” reputation as a film that promotes gay marriage. While obviously the subject of the movie is indeed a recently married gay couple, John Lithgow and Alfred Molina turning in some of the best work of their prestigious careers, it is really a movie about how two aging people, who have made a life together, cope when they are separated. It shoves nothing in your face and rather creates a beautiful relationship that experiences such embarrassments and indignities of trying to find affordable housing in New York while affording to keep their healthcare.
The movie starts on what seems like a normal morning, but we quickly realize as Ben (John Lithgow) showers and puts on his bowtie and George makes sure the catering is going to be on time that they are moving towards their wedding. It’s a small affair with a variety of guests who love this couple. Kate (Marisa Tomei), married to Ben’s nephew Elliot (Darren E. Burrows), toasts the two saying that their relationship has always been an example to Elliot and her. She does this while Ben and George play the piano together and sing. I envision many such parties taking place in their apartment of twenty years with the entire party rotating around them because, when they are together, Ben and George are larger than life and alone they are quiet and withdrawn.
Of course, George risks a great deal by getting married considering he signed a morality clause working at a Catholic school. He is shortly fired after his marriage. The film treats these events not as plot point, moving from one to another, but rather uses of fade to blacks, suggesting a life changing event that slowly sinks in. We don’t see George tell Ben that he’s been fired. We don’t see an argument, but rather come in during the middle of a discussion with their friends about the fact that they are going to need help. They are going to need a place to stay. Thus begins their separation that will test their relationship more than even event, including romantic affairs in their past.
Ira Sachs so delicately makes this film and really emphasizes the subtle reality of how, living with people, brings out the worst in us. How lucky Ben and George are to have found someone else who will put up with their eccentricities. Marisa Tomei’s Kate starts so lovingly, but as family pressures mount with her son and Ben’s omnipresence in their small apartment, she begins to crack ever so slightly allowing herself out only to explode in misdirected anger.
Many will be unsatisfied with the ending of the film. It leaves many questions… why did Joey (Kate’s son) steal books with his very strange friend Vlad? Do Elliot and Kate solve their marital problems? Where does George continue to live after it seems he moves out of his friends’ apartment? But I have no problems with that. Like life, too many things are left unanswered, including the question that haunts the film… why?
