Apologies to Stanley Kramer, the dearly departed director of some of my favorite message movies — “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “The Defiant Ones” “Judgment at Nuremberg” — for what I am about to say.
As much as Ira Sachs’ “Love Is Strange,” starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, touches on marriage equality for gays and lesbians, the economy and health care, it is not a message movie. Thankfully.
On that Lithgow and Sachs agree.
“It’s not a message film, It’s not a polemic,” the actor said on the phone recently. “By virtue of the fact it dignifies and respects these two men. You see their relationship in all its different colors.”
For decades Ben (Lithgow) and George (Molina) have lived in an apartment in Manhattan. For those many years, they could not wed. Then, because the film is set in this potent moment in LGBT rights, they can.
When they do, their family and friends rejoice. And then the parochial school where George teaches music, where he is loved by his students and trusted by their parents
fires him. His sacking is all so very “don’t ask, don’t tell,” fairly gentle but final.
When George loses his job, the couple sells their apartment and separates temporarily, unhappily. George moves in with their neighbors, two gay cops. Ben, a painter, bunks (literally) in Brooklyn with his nephew (Darren Burrows), his wife (Marisa Tomei) and their teenage son.
“To me it’s one of those remarriage comedies in the line of what Stanley Cavell wrote about in (the book) ‘Pursuits of Happiness.’ All those films that managed to talk about love while depicting separation,” said Sachs who co-wrote the film with Mauricio Zacharias, his writing partner on 2012’s “Keep the Lights On.”
“Separation is what actually gives you the ability to then see how this relationship is never out of the context of family and community. I think all my films have been about that. We’re not defined separately from our place in time and in a world
While the moods of Sachs’ films have undergone telling shifts since his grand-jury prize win for “40 Shades of Blue” at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, there remains a powerful through line: Sachs has an exquisite way with actors.
“He doesn’t behave like a director,” Lithgow said. “I think he told you he doesn’t rehearse. From that perspective, he’s very unconventional. He does spend a lot of time with us before shooting.”
Sachs traveled to Calgary, Alberta, to work with the actor while he was shooting Christopher Nolan’s upcoming space drama, “Interstellar.”
“He spent two days going through the script line by line, devising a very detailed backstory for Ben and Ben and George’s relationship. Even though it’s never mentioned, it’s a touchstone,” says Lithgow.
“We created the moments when he must have met George, 40 years ago, what New York was like then, what it must have meant for two outsiders who came to New York and finally felt they were accepted, finally found a community,” says Lithgow. “Everything about the process was personal.”
It was deep tissue work, aided by, Lithgow believes, both his and Molina’s own long marriages. Lithgow and Mary Yeager have been married 33 years.
“I’ve known my wife for 35, 36 years now. That indeed was my own point of reference. As was Fred’s. We discovered that together the first few days. And we both responded that way to the script. This is the most vivid portrait of a long relationship we’d ever seen,” said Lithgow.
“Any long relationship is going to have a history of discord and crankiness along with love and commitment. It’s going to have humor. It’s going to have shared history.”
Ask about his wife, Mary, Sachs nudged. And Lithgow gladly oblige
“It’s an impossible relationship,” he said in a way that makes one imagine, it’s just about the opposite of impossible.
“She’s a professor and I’m an actor. And they really don’t belong together,” he said then laughed with deep delight. “But I just adore her. And we really are inseparable — though we are separated often.”
Yeager is a professor of economic history at UCLA.
“The facts tell it all. A professor’s life is very orderly and regimented,” he said. “You never know what’s going to happen with me. I always say I bring a little restlessness, recklessness, unpredictability to her life and she brings a little order to mine.”
Lithgow had just finished portraying King Lear in Central Park to great praise and was soon to embark on a second play in New York City: Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” with Glenn Close.
“She never dreamed she’d marry a person like me,” he continued, although he admitted that Yeager isn’t entirely comfortable being written about. He couldn’t help himself.
“Actually, that’s not true. When she was a kid she fantasized about being married to a movie star. She’s a Montana farm girl. So she’s got that extraordinary spine to her. But she’s a renegade. She left Montana for college in the east, which for a Montana farm girl is a very defiant thing to do. Bit by bit, she became an economic and business historian.” It’s a beautiful
soliloquy. Ask about his wife, indeed.
“The whole point is that there’s no real difference between a straight and gay marriage because there’s no basic difference between gay and straight people.”
There is a third marriage that deeply informed “Love Is Strange” of course: Sachs’ to Boris Torres. They live in New York City, the fathers of young twins.
“You can say this movie feels very much about this moment and this time,” said the director. “It actually sort of reveals how the laws change lives personally.”
Sach knows he’s a reflection of that change. And not, he said, “just because I was getting married, but because I was happy in myself and in this new relationship.”
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
