WE OWN THE NIGHT

(James Gray, 2007)

James Gray's third film as writer-director, We Own the Night, feels generally a little too familiar. It covers territory audiences know well from a clutch of other films - New York Cops hunting down a drug ring, a man caught between friends and family, loyalty, violence, the dark streets of the American city in the past three decades, guilt, justice, revenge. You've seen it all before. You've seen it a few time sin the last decade, in fact. You've seen American Gangster or The Departed. We Own the Night is like a younger brother to those two films - its stars are less starry, its director less of a name, its budget and running time obviously less inflated.
Gray is a true auteur - he has written and directed each of his films, and they share his thematic concerns. He is interested in family, in violence, in guilt and responsibility. He is a gifted director. Each of the films is directed with a confidence and inventiveness that is remarkably assured. The problem seems to lie with his writing, which can be uneven. He writes some beautiful scenes - sparkling dialogue and powerful emotions brought to the surface, realistically and painfully - but also some real clunkers. The plotting - particularly in We Own the Night- can seem horribly second-hand and derivative. When in doubt, resort to violence, seems to be Gray's way. But his characters can ground the films with their painful dilemmas, each of them conflicted and agonised by their lives.
What is most distinctive is Gray's seriousness. Each of his films is sombre and darkly atmospheric, intent on its own little tragedy. The Yards seems bent on turning itself into a mini-Godfather with its seeming mission to look like a John Alton-shot film noir in colour and its operatic heights of tension and release. Indeed, each of his films is beautifully lensed, and Gray deserves praise for his classicism, his determination to shoot films uncorrupted by modern editing styles and lighting techniques. It gives his work a timeless look, warm and lived-in yet never shrinking from the grubbiness of the urban underbelly they observe. His skill as a director is most apparent in the impact each of his set-pieces delivers. We Own the Night, for instance, delivers a couple of stunning scenes. The first, a deafening, bloody police raid on a drug factory in a tenement building, is preceded by an equally impressive build-up of tension as one character feels that exposure as a police mole is close. The second is a car chase along a highway in a rainstorm. Here Gray's cutting and shot choice is exemplary yet never predictable, keeping the scene exciting yet intimate, horrific and convincingly confusing as it is. The film's finale - a bracingly suspenseful and visceral pursuit on foot through a field of reeds - is another example of his gift for set-pieces, as is the central fist-fight in The Yards, perhaps the most realistic ever put on film. He is adept at evoking clammy fear, the dread of discovery, the adrenaline of sudden violence, always a you-are-there feeling of inhabiting a scene, perhaps because his approach to such scenes is always fresh and different.
Despite all this the best scene in We Own the Night is the opening credits. I say "credits" although there are none. The movie's title is only visible as part of a badge in one of the photos making up the opening photo montage. This montage is composed entirely of period photos of NYC police at work - and a few evocative crime scene shots - from the 70s or early 80s. These photographs tell their own vivid and intriguing tales, with the faces looking out from some of them, the perfectly captured moments of real life, real police, real criminals, drug paraphernalia. You can almost smell some of the rooms, the stink of sweat and cigarettes. The photos are all black & white, full of subtly textured greys, and reminiscent in many cases of the work of legendary crime scene photographer Weegee. An instrumental, loungey lite-jazz reading of "I'll Be Seeing You" by Jackie Gleason's Orchestra plays over the top, its elegiac sadness counterpointing the bleak starkness of some of the images. Its a strangely potent sequence, and a reminder of the unequivocal power of the still photograph to capture an instant. It sets an aesthetic standard the rest of the film has significant trouble reaching, though Gray and his excellent cast give it a good go.

THE IMMIGRANT

(James Gray, 2013)

James Gray deserves the same status as the most beloved and acclaimed directors of his generation. In terms of talent, he is right up there alongside the Andersons, for instance, both Paul Thomas and Wes.
He will, however, never be fashionable, you feel. He is a classicist, and there is something serious and sober in his work which is slightly out of step with modern taste.
The Immigrant, perhaps more than any other film, is the fullest expression of that classicism. An old-fashioned melodrama in terms of its plotting, it is muted and quietened by Gray until its passions are deep beneath the surface, only visible in the occasional eruption of violence or raw feeling from its characters.
Gray instead finds much of that feeling in the beautifully haunted eyes of his leading lady. Cotillard has something of the silent movie siren about her, and he is able to locate the pain and longing in that face, which takes up much screentime here.
The story centres on Cotillard's Iwa, a Polish immigrant who arrives with her sister Magda at Ellis Island in 1921. Magda is immediately dragged away, suspected of suffering from tuberculosis, and Iwa is to be deported back to Europe when she is spotted by Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), who pays off a guard and takes her back to his house. He offers her work, but is gradually revealed to be a pimp, who first takes Iwa on as a dancer in his troupe at a club, then arranges for her to become a prostitute. All this time she is saving money to rescue her sister, and further, brighter hope arrives in the shape of Emil (Jeremy Renner), a magician who is kind and poetic and takes an instant shine to Iwa.
This is all patiently, calmly paced by Gray, the story moving forth only in increments. But what beautiful, magical increments they are. Shot by Darius Khondji on a relatively low budget, The Immigrant looks ravishing; it's evocation of the tenement world in '20s New York is shocking but utterly compelling. That tenement world is crucial to Gray's work here; this is a creation myth of the American Dream, and it plumbs very deep.
Gray's style is unfussy, classical, but his superb eye allows the odd dazzling composition (such as the ones that begin & end the film). However, his favoured shot here is of Marion Cotillard's face. So much rests on Cotillard here, and she is sublime. Though the film demands that she remains still and reserved for much of the running time, her eyes signal all of the repressed emotion she is suffering, all the pain and shame and loneliness. Renner is a charming match for her, but Phoenix's glowering pimp is a more interesting character. In love with this girl, he nonetheless makes her a prostitute, twists and manipulates her and does his best to ensure she stays by his side.
That sort of psychological complexity - and the arthouse trappings - is what makes such an old-fashioned film feel so thrillingly contemporary. Gray's talent and ability as a storyteller is what makes it so hypnotic.
A magnificent film.