THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER16, 2019 39
his terrace, and Gray would sometimes
sit outside and listen to someone prac-
ticing the harp in hers. When they met
for the first time, at a party, he was over-
come at being face to face. “You’re Sofia
Coppola!” he cried, as if greeting an old
friend. “I’m James Gray! I can see into
your apartment!”
“It’s one of those things that, as soon
as it comes out of your mouth, you know
it’s horrifying,” Gray says. He describes
the incident as “probably the most em-
barrassing social moment of my life.”
Soon he was at work on “The Yards,”
which draws its material from his fa-
ther’s shady dealings. It concerns a pa-
roled convict named Leo (Mark Wahl-
berg), who becomes embroiled in corrupt
ploys to get subway contracts, with mur-
derous consequences. “The Yards” was
also the first collaboration between Gray
and Joaquin Phoenix (as the hardboiled
man who leads Leo into the under-
world). “He’s very good about stripping
away the intellectual ideas we have,”
Phoenix told me. “We talk for hours and
bring up references—friends or well-
known people—but eventually you want
to deconstruct that and reveal something
that feels not like a character.”
For Gray, the thrills of creation came
in details that could resonate with his
experience. “For example, in ‘We Own
the Night’”—the story of a Mobby
night-club manager (Phoenix) and his
father, a deputy police chief (Robert
Duvall)—“a guy takes the eye of the
fish and sucks on it, which is something
my grandfather used to do,” he says. His
first three movies all use an aural effect
that sound engineers call “singing semis”:
the wash of distant trucks, which to him
bore the authenticity of home.
“We Own the Night” brought Gray
his first taste of real commercial success.
Despite his precocious start, he was nearly
forty when it came out, with just two
other films to his name—a casualty of
the struggle for financing amid meagre
box-office performance. On the strength
of “We Own the Night,” he was able to
move on quickly to a new project. “They
basically said to me, ‘Here’s $9.2 million.
Make whatever you want,’ ” Gray recalls.
“I was given a rare opportunity.”
Gray was by then married, having
met his wife at a dinner party where he
was being set up with her writing part-
ner. He felt that he had reached a happy
moment in his life. “Two Lovers,” which
he wrote with the late Richard Menello,
an eccentric whom Gray describes as a
cinematic encyclopedia, follows Leon-
ard, the depressed son of dry cleaners
in Brighton Beach (Phoenix), as he is
introduced by his parents to a nice young
woman from a prospering local family
(Vinessa Shaw) but finds himself fall-
ing in love with a more mysterious and
troubled woman (Gwyneth Paltrow),
whose apartment, across from his, he
can see into. Her window becomes a
screen for him, a passage to a distant,
different life that he can learn to touch
and live inside.
“Two Lovers” was Gray’s first at-
tempt to move from the autobiograph-
ical to the personal—from capturing his
outer world (the fish eye, the singing
semis) to capturing his inner life. Near
the climax of the film, Leonard throws
a ring with which he was planning to
propose to Paltrow’s character toward
the sea: an unambiguous, timeless ges-
ture, and one that reflects Gray’s inter-
est in stories that convey particular ex-
perience through the durable structures
of myth. “The classical idea is not to
make conservative movies, but to give
a structure through which we explore
the lie of the fantasy of narrative,” he
told me. He objects to well-made mov-
ies that have cloudy or open-ended nar-
ratives; a film that can be read in manyways can be read in any way, like a Ror-
schach blot, he thinks, merely reflect-
ing viewers’ minds back at them. A work
of art ought instead to extend a view-
er’s empathetic reach, to force a con-
frontation with the mind and the expe-
rience of someone else. If the story was
clear, you could bring anybody anywhere.
And you could give them somewhere
solid to stand even as the film performed
a scrutiny of its own myths.
“‘Vertigo’ does it perfectly,” he said.
“The story is not vague, but there’s also
a window through which you can see
the text at war with the subtext. That’s
a thing of beauty. ‘Contempt,’ by Go-
dard, is a great narrative, though it’s told
in an unusual way. ‘Jeanne Dielman,’ by
Chantal Akerman”—a film paced
around domestic chores, performed in
real time—“is a story.” In crafting the
story of “Two Lovers,” Gray found him-
self worrying less about carrying audi-
ences into the physical world he knew
(a sliver of Brooklyn and Queens) and
more about carrying them into feelings
and self-generated narratives that shaped
his actual experience of the world. “It
was about uncertainty and being em-
barrassed of your background,” he told
me. “I was trying to break down the
wall between myself and the work.”
Ethan Gross describes the film as a
breakthrough. “I love Scorsese and ‘The
Godfather,’ but I saw too much of it in