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You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs’s fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it’s going to be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in what is immediately identifiable as a Manhattan apartment. But in movie-signpost terms, they’re not the kind of New York digs we’re used to seeing: This isn’t an air- and light-filled Tribeca loft, or one of those costly Brooklyn brownstones where allegedly “average” families live. In fact, its major features — artwork and books and a piano — render it as vaguely anonymous, but also pinpoint it as a place where two intellectually and culturally curious people of average means have lived forever, because there’s no way they could afford it otherwise.
The two begin to dress for what is clearly not an average day. Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) put on suits that square perfectly with who they are, even though we don’t yet know who they are: Ben’s pale, gently rumpled poplin and George’s more dapper (and more sober) brown three-piece jibe with the way they walk, and with their past-middle-aged shapes: The clothes are as used to their bodies as these two are to one another. They leave the apartment and immediately begin to bicker and debate, right on the street, in the most New York of ways: “We’re going to be late.” “We’ll be fine.” “I knew we should have hired a car.” “Don’t run — I don’t want to get all sweaty.” This is how marriages begin between partners who have known each other forever. Mazel tov!
Love Is Strange is partly a movie about gay marriage: The guests radiate genuine happiness that their friends are finally able to legally marry. But really, Sachs — who co-wrote the script with Mauricio Zacharias — has made a movie that’s both more broadly and more specifically about love, New York and real estate, perhaps not even in that order. It’s about things that actually matter in life and in a partnership, including the debit column in the checkbook.
The wedding day is only the beginning of new troubles. George teaches music at a Catholic school, but he’s dismissed for having defied the fossilized tenets of the Church. Ben is an underemployed painter, which means the pair’s finances aren’t exactly robust, and they need to downsize. They decide to sell their apartment and move into something smaller. For practical reasons, they split temporarily until they can find a new home: Ben goes to live with his nephew, filmmaker Elliott (Darren E. Burrows), who’s married to novelist Kate (Marisa Tomei, giving a prickly, appealing performance).
George has problems of his own in his temporary digs: He has moved in with younger friends (played by Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez), a couple who happen to be cops and whose lively nighttime socializing extends long past George’s normal bedtime. These are all people who care about one another deeply, yet everyone feels cramped.
Ben and George don’t fight about money, but money — or, rather, the lack of it — has torn a hole in their lives. It’s through their separation that Sachs captures the texture of their partnership, and Molina and Lithgow, in performances that rank among the best of their careers, fill in all the colors and shadows. Molina’s George is both more practical and more retreating; he doesn’t fight back when he loses his job, as it’s simply not in his nature to push that hard. Lithgow’s Ben is crabbier, flightier, more stubborn, but also, perhaps, more generous. He picks at George, but only to a point. When he stops himself, his affection pours out, as if it were something only thinly (and badly) disguised by his grouchiness.
Sachs and his performers know that the perfect marriage is a thing of phantom beauty; it doesn’t exist, yet we persist in believing that someone out there must have it. The great tragedy, and the wonder, of the tragic, wonderful institution of marriage is that sometimes it is perfect, but only for minutes at a time.
