Love is Strange

Love is Strange is a classical meditation on a pop song and sentiment. There’s no mention of the Mickey and Sylvia hit of that title. Instead the film takes its theme from the music lesson George (Alfred Molina) gives his young student. It’s a Chopin etude, which to perform you have to respect the formal structure, the rhythm of the metronome, even as you find your own emotional life in the material.

In the larger drama George and his lover Ben (John Lithgow) provide the metronome — a deep, abiding love that has lasted not just 39 years but their now getting married — and then being economically forced to live with separate friends/family. As no piece of music is about the metronome, the basic rhythm, but the variations played around it, this film is less about Ben and George than about how the other characters respond to them.

The last scene strikes a heartening note. Ben’s troubled teen nephew Joey works out three liberations. He comes to George to deliver Ben’s last painting, a portrait of Joey’s dangerous ex-friend Vlad, apologizes for missing Ben’s funeral, then in the hallway erupts in the tears he had suppressed since his uncle’s death. He goes outside to meet his new girl-friend and they skateboard out to the bright dusk together. 

As the girl is apparently Latina their connection shows Joey courageous enough to follow his heart across conventional, discriminating lines. He has benefited from Ben’s bunkbed advice to pursue a love, at the risk of embarrassment or disappointment. As Ben and George begin the film in love and stay in love through to the end, despite their painful separation, the film is about Joey's t growth. He discovers the strangeness of love and the willingness to cross into the strange to find it.

This contrasts to his mother (Marisa Tomei). She crumbles from romantic hope to selfish anger. At the men’s wedding reception she recalls being moved to accept her husband’s proposal when he introduced her to his Uncle Ben, George and their obviously profound love. When Ben is forced to live with them she buckles under the strain of his chattering when she tries to write her second novel, her teenage son’s detachment and her husband’s even more worrisome absence and disengagement. For a writer she proves under skilled both in psychological insight and in the words with which to deal with it. The New Age sister in Poughkeepsie is even more remote and unhelpful.

On one level this film celebrates our society’s apparent state of liberation. Gay people can marry and enjoy an open life, largely free from old prejudices. Indeed two male lovers are cops. So too a woman can enjoy a novelist’s career without giving up the ambivalent blessings of being a mother and a wife. And a middle class white boy can comfortably date a Latina kindred spirit.

But beneath those apparent new freedoms the old bedrock animosities survive. If  gays enjoyed the true freedom from old prejudice George would not have been fired and/or the school parents would have reared up to force his reinstatement. The couple would have had some help finding a flat they could share without the fortuitous meeting of a rent-controlled gay dumpee. The old prejudice would not survive in fossils of language (“That’s so gay”). If a woman were really free to live her career this one would not be solely burdened with putting up with her husband’s irksome uncle and their troubled kid. And if interracial romance really were so free that last scene wouldn't give the film the whip-snap climax it does. While this film is about the current freedom from old prejudice it also reminds us of the negative bedrock that persists.
     Because the film opts for meditation over sensation its most explicit love scenes are Ben and George kissing, the most touching the candour of their conversation and confessions. Joey’s furtive discovery with Vlad is about their stolen French books, not sexual experiment or drugs. The film’s metronome rhythm is marked with scenes of long quiet duration, like the vacated subway entrance shot in which Ben makes his last appearance, descending from our view and — we learn — from his lover’s life.