Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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James Gray (1969 - XX)
Ranking: Lightly Likable

Cowboys and Indians (short film, date unknown); Little Odessa (1994); The Yards (2000); We Own the Night (2007); Two Lovers (2009); Alphabet City (2008)

If nothing else, James Gray needs to be saluted for maintaining an integrity of vision within a soul destroying industry. He has been both writer and director on the three releases credited to his name thus far. He doesn’t appear to have compromised his ideas, his films, or his approach. There are, thus, the inevitable gaps between the feature films, approximately seven years, slightly longer than normal for modern film production, but a time frame which constitutes both a sign of potential integrity and a frustration to his fans.

If the adage “write what you know” is applicable to filmmaking, than Gray has seized it. The child of Russian immigrants, he was raised in Queens, and all of his films so far have been gritty New York dramas. They have the expansive political concerns of a Sidney Lumet film combined with the intense nervous energy of a Martin Scorsese epic. Like Richard Price’s tales, Gray’s films so far focus on family tension, primarily the conflict between brothers. His vehicle for exploring these tensions, at least in his first two films, is the figure of the returning wastrel, Tim Roth in Little Odessa , a hitman of Russian extraction returning to Brighton Beach to perform a hit, and Mark Wahlberg in The Yards , a car thief returning home from prison, wanting to go straight but soon falling under the sway of his childhood friend, Willie Guitierrez (Joaquin Phoenix). In We Own the Night , set in 1988, a family is divided by its different interests, police work in one direction, disco night-clubbing in the other. Gray pursues these themes with an intense commitment that demands respect even when the films themselves might seem indistinguishable from each other.

Gray’s muse appears to be Joaquin Phoenix, who is in two of the films (and possibly a third), and who seems to be the Gray equivalent in We Own the Night, whose main character, Bobby Green, has dropped his given name, Grusinsky, for the more ethnically neutral last name of his mother’s side of the family. But unlike the characters who serve as his avatars, Gray has higher artistic ambitions. He initially set forth to become a painter, and his films, especially The Yards, have a painterly look, and are often surprisingly but not unpleasantly static for urban crime films. Gray gravitates toward actors with Oscar potential, and has a knack for seeing complexity in actresses commonly viewed only as sex symbols, such as Charlize Theron. Eva Mendes may start out in We Own the Night as a stupefyingly erotic icon, but soon evolves into a complex character who is a secondary victim of Bobby Green’s inner turmoil.

If there were more films to judge, Gray might evince both a more vivid thematic effect and be crowned with a higher ranking, so time will tell if he will broaden his appetite or burrow further into his small set of themes and obsessions. For the time being, Gray shows great consistency of vision and style, but also a limiting concentration on his operatically arrayed retinue of interchangeable characters. His next films are slated to be an urban love story from a collaborated-upon script, and an adaptation of the book Alphabet City by Steven Knight.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.