Last train to nowhere

>> The Yards ups director James Gray's track record

by MATTHEW HAYS

"Seventies movies are awesome," says Yards director James Gray impulsively, breaking momentarily from his otherwise carefully deliberated interview style. "They're fuckin' great."

From the first frames of The Yards--titles in Helvetica typeface, pushed far left in a Coppola fashion--the film echoes what many consider the last great decade of American cinema. Not that it's a bellbottom costume drama or muscle-car nostalgia trip. In fact, the film achieves a remarkable transtemporal quality, as easily placed 30 minutes ago as 30 years.

"I didn't intend for it to look '70s," says Gray, "but for it to be in the same style, an homage to the 1970s in terms of the style of movie-making, which was story-obsessed, characterization-obsessed, not reliant at all on special effects or extreme bouts of violence. I was very cognizant of making a film with a restrained aesthetic, one that didn't feature this sort of glib, ironic posturing of popular culture."

Gray's first feature film, the Russian-emigré gangster number Little Odessa, already showed his knack for capturing life in lower-case type, the mundane, pedestrian environment which ordinary people call home. The Yards even more so, not just in terms of dialogue and storyline but even of scenery and backgrounds which seem to resonate with a dull, sad, understated accuracy.

"I try to choose locations that haven't been used a hundred times in movies. New York is so photographed, so often, that it's interesting to expose a part of the city that you haven't seen a million times. For me, that was the train yards. You don't see films taking place there, or Burrough Hall, that weird, James-Bond-looking fortress building with the pink marble, or Roosevelt Island. I'm conscious of the introduction of a new yet familiar New York."

Dinosaurs in dot-com land

This is reflected in his choice of NYC's subway industry, and its attendant graft and corruption, as the canvas on which he paints a portrait of an extended family's slow-cooking suffering. After Odessa's gangster angst, public transport seems a less obvious wellspring of drama, but Gray finds a vein all the same.

"It's a billion-dollar industry, but ultimately all you're looking for is a metaphoric importance. I had long wanted to do a film about working-class individuals in New York, a movie that was very sympathetic to them, because they were people who I grew up with and who I knew. Also, my father worked at a company that manufactured stuff for the New York subways, and the stories he told were very dramatic.

"The world of these people is an environment that's rapidly becoming extinct in the U.S., particularly New York. It's a very blue-collar world, about manufacturing, and the world, or at least America, is now very dot-com obsessed, very new-economy obsessed. They're dinosaurs, in a way, doomed because they don't have the education you need in today's economy. So they're now grasping at straws, grasping for a little piece of the pie."

While the dirty pool and political machinations ring true, Gray shines brightest on the home front--The Yards is, I repeat, the story of a family fighting to keep itself together. To that end, an excellent cast balances hot young stuff--Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Charlize Theron--with sturdy talent in Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway and James Caan, who delivers his best turn in years. "He's great at conveying a certain explosiveness," says Gray, "even when he isn't yelling at someone. He's not that big! He comes up to, like, here on me! But he has a great mythology behind him. You see James Caan in a movie, it means something."

Family ties

"The real idea," Gray continues, "is the struggle that people have to fit in. Wahlberg even says to his mother, at one point, 'I did everything I could to try and fit in.' But everybody does--Joaquin is trying to fit into that family, James Caan as a big politico guy. Ellen Burstyn talks to Wahlberg endlessly about how she wishes he could be a man in a suit and fit in to that.

"What she's saying to him is both warm and tender but also vicious--I love you but you've disappointed me. I'm a fan of the idea that familial life, relationships between mothers and sons, brothers, whatever, are always filled with an odd tension--love, but also disdain."

A theme Gray will likely carry to his next film, possibly a cop drama. "I'm contemplating the Street Crimes Unit, which is an elite battalion of the NYPD. They recently shot someone 42 times. He turned out to be innocent, so it was a big brouhaha in New York.

"I did gangsters, and then business and government, so now I may do the police. We'll see."

The Yards opens Friday, Feb. 2