Finding room for true affection
Lithgow, Molina share easy chemistry as plot teeters on the brink of tragedy
LOVE IS STRANGE
★★★ 1/2 Starring: John Lithgow, Alfred Molina Directed by: Ira Sachs Running time: 94 minutes Love is strange. Mmm-mmm. Once you’ve had it, you’re in an awful fix. Mmm-mmm.
As these familiar song lyrics make abundantly clear, being in love is a state of absurd, intellectual acceptance of non-linguistic expression.
We go from self-recognition of lost control: “Love is strange.” To the childlike bliss of “Mmmmmm.” And we do it in one fluid act of falling, believing we’re elevating ourselves to a higher state.
Love isn’t just strange, it’s entirely irrational, which is why movies about love, of any kind, are typically more suspenseful, dramatic and compelling than gratuitous explosions — because you never actually know what’s going to happen next.
Ira Sachs’s Love Is Strange is a perfect example of this miraculous movie phenomenon because it’s a very simple story of two men who’ve been together for 40 years suddenly torn apart by circumstance.
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) shared a life in the humble Greenwich Village apartment they called home, but when George loses his job at the school where he teaches music, the couple is forced to move out and separate. They say it’s only for the short term. They believe they will find a new place, but New York City’s real estate market is becoming inaccessible to people like Ben and George, and they are falling through the cracks.
Their friends and family offer support, and this is where most of the gentle humour in Sachs’s piece comes from: the moments where each man is forced to rediscover bits and pieces of himself through new surroundings, or where we’re simply watching Lithgow sprawled out on the bottom bunk of a boy’s room in his pyjamas.
Everyone in the film behaves with humanity and common sense, so nothing all that eventful really happens. Time passes. And we watch Ben and George navigate a new reality, sometimes as comedy, but always with a deep throbbing gong of pathos.
The movie seems to teeter on
It’s a very simple story of two men who’ve been together for 40 years suddenly torn apart.
the brink of tragedy with its earnest tone and somewhat fragile characters, but there is lightness in every breath of dialogue, an inner sense of forgiveness that allows George and Ben to be imperfect while remaining sympathetic.
Inside this subtle soup of observational humour and big city blues there is a universal truth about relationships and how they define us, not just to others and to ourselves, but in physical space. The brick-and-mortar envelopes we live in aren’t just revenue ledgers, tax writeoffs and investment decisions. They can bring us together or pull us apart, depending on where we — as a society — decide to assign value.