Love Is Strange

Ira Sachs’ beautifully observed domestic drama Love Is Strange stars John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as Ben and George, a gay couple that finally ties the knot after living together for four decades. This leads to George loosing his church job, and the two elderly men are forced to sell their apartment and move in temporarily with friends and family. Sachs’ title is more strange than anything in his film, which goes out of its way to present a simple and tremendously relatable story about the difficulties of living with family (be they older relatives or teenage kids) and the struggle to find affordable housing in contemporary New York. Molina and Lithgow give wonderful performances as their characters carefully try to avoid becoming a burden to their loved ones without giving up on their own needs, goals, and dreams.

Sachs and his cast are perhaps too good at evoking the tense and unpleasant feelings of inconvenience, interdependence, separation, stress, and loss. These are not especially pleasant emotions to experience vicariously in a movie theater. Fortunately, Molina and Lithgow are equally adept at conveying love, understanding, friendship, sympathy, and kindness. I wish the film had been more interested in setting up their predicament and more richly developing some of the supporting characters. It’s crazy to sell an apartment in New York, unless you can make a killing off it, and Sachs’ doesn’t make it clear why this was the only option for his protagonists. Likewise, their alternative plan of temporarily moving in with Ben’s niece in Poughkeepsie doesn’t seem all that terrible an option. Yes the niece seems a little shrewish, and yes it would be a bit difficult to get back and forth to the city to look for new digs; but Poughkeepsie has a  vibrant artistic community, and the way everyone in the film instantly rules out this option seems wrongheaded and even elitist.