BEFORE: I'm going out tonight to an NYU alumni event, just a little get-together in Manhattan, so if I'm late posting tonight, that's why, I maybe came home full of hors d'oeuvres and drinks and went straight to bed -
Alfred Molina carries over from "Enchanted April".
Tomorrow, Thursday, March 5 is day 20 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and the themes are "Oscar Goes to Book Club" and "Oscar Goes Into Politics". Here's the line-up:
6:00 am "A Farewell to Arms" (1932)
7:30 am "Of Mice and Men" (1939)
9:30 am "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935)
11:45 am "Great Expectations" (1946)
1:45 pm "Tom Jones" (1963)
4:00 pm "Madame Bovary" (1949)
6:00 pm "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945)
8:00 pm "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939)
10:15 pm "The Great McGinty" (1940)
12:00 am "Seven Days in May" (1964)
2:15 am "The Fog of War" (2003)
4:15 am "The Candidate" (1972)
Well, I've managed to watch the WRONG versions of a lot of these films, the remakes, in other words, which were of course less likely to receive Oscar nominations. I recently watched more recent versions of "Of Mice and Men" and "Great Expectations", just not the versions that TCM is focused on, aka the classic ones. But I've seen "Tom Jones" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", and "The Candidate", plus I watched "The Fog of War" in one of my Doc Blocks. So another four today, which brings me to 98 seen out of 235, or 41.7%. Statistically with just 11 days to go I think I've leveled off, it would take a complete sweep or a complete blow-out to really move the needle now.
THE PLOT: After Ben and George get married, George is fired from his teaching post, forcing them to stay with friends separately while they look for cheaper housing - a situation that weighs heavily on all involved.
AFTER: This story feels like it had to come from real life - most likely the writer/director had a gay uncle who maybe lost his apartment for a similar reason. The nephew character here is some kind of filmmaker, so that could easily be the character that represents the director, Ira Sachs. Yeah, you learn to spot that sort of thing after watching a few thousand movies. The details on HOW this gay couple lost their co-op apartment are so specific, it feels like it really happened to someone.
The chain of events, of course, was probably kicked off by the legalization of gay marriage. I still LOVE the story about how this became legal across the country, it happened because while some states had settled on a "domestic partnership" compromise, where long-term gay couples could share benefits without any of the downsides of marriage, however conservatives passed the Defense of Marriage Act to ban gay marriage at the federal level, and this was deemed to be unconstitutional. And therefore, using reverse logic, if it's illegal to ban gay marriage, then by default it's legal! Perhaps this is an over-simplification of what occurred, but I think it's still darn elegant. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantee equal protection and due process to all citizens, and therefore DOMA was repealed and the legal argument made in 2003 that government cannot discriminate against marriage on the basis of gender was therefore expanded to the whole country.
But there had to be some ramifications somewhere - in 2015 naturally there was a sudden wave of gay people getting married, some of whom had been waiting a very long time. For a select few, perhaps the legislation made no difference and some people just continued in their long domestic partnerships - like if you didn't care BEFORE what the government thought about your gay relationship, why should you care AFTER the legislation was passed? But whatever, there were a bunch of happy brides with brides and grooms with grooms. The caterers and cake designers were probably also very happy about the uptick in business, not to mention gay divorce lawyers. Yes, if there's going to be gay marriages there will be gay divorces, gay alimony, gay custody battles.
In this film, we have George, a music teacher who finally marries his long-term partner Ben, however George teaches in a Catholic school, which sees fit to fire him because his lifestyle does not match with the teachings of the church. This has a domino effect and Ben and George can no longer afford their West Village co-op apartment, so they have to sell it at a penalty and look for a new place to live. The "flip tax" mentioned here is a very specific thing, which reinforces my belief that all of this really happened to some screenwriter's uncle. What George SHOULD have done is immediately contact a lawyer, because firing someone on the basis of their sexual orientation is probably illegal, even for the Catholic Church. Even if he couldn't keep his job, George could have received a settlement and walked away with enough money to buy a house somewhere or a Manhattan condo. A better real-estate lawyer could have fought the flip tax, too.
The couple gets on the waiting list for affordable housing and then splits up, with Ben going to live with his nephew's family in Brooklyn, and George moving in with their former neighbors, a younger gay couple that is also NYPD cops who like to party and play D&D with their friends until the wee hours of the morning. Sure, the situation is hardly ideal, and probably exaggerated here for comic effect, in another edition of "What Could Possibly Go Wrong" where everything, of course, goes very wrong.
There were other answers, though, they just wouldn't have been so funny or so tragic. They could have stayed together if they just took the first apartment they could find, or they could have moved to Florida or Pennsylvania or something, but no, they're New Yorkers and some of those people would never, ever move out of the city. They wouldn't even move up to Poughkeepsie to live with another member of Ben's family, even though she had a big house with a spare room for them - but hell no, it's Poughkeepsie and I get why they didn't want to go there. It's at least a 2-hour drive, and that's with no traffic. You know, parts of Long Island are very nice, just saying, and there are some nice restaurants out there, four or five Chinese buffets.
Instead, Ben moves in with his nephew, his wife and their teenage son, and shares bunk beds with that son. Umm, NITPICK POINT: why did they have bunk beds if they only had one son? Most people only buy bunk beds if they have multiple children, nobody really buys bunk beds because they think their kid might have a sleepover someday, right? Anyway, Ben is always underfoot and chatty when Kate is trying to right, and Joey is always hanging out with this weird kid named Vlad, we don't know if they're skateboarding together or doing drugs together or being gay together, they're at that weird age when everything and anything is possible and fun as long as their parents will hate it. Meanwhile George continues giving private piano lessons and looks for a new job at a new school, instead of hiring a lawyer to sue the Catholic Church for firing him.
Kate suggests that Ben take up painting again, so he paints a portrait of Vlad on the roof of their building, but later falls down the stairs coming down from the roof. He injures his arm, so there goes the idea of him going up on the roof to paint and staying out of Kate's way. Then there's a weird subplot about Joey and Vlad stealing books from the school library, it doesn't make much sense or it's never really fully explained, whichever. George meets a man at a party thrown in the apartment he's living in, and that man turns him on to a rent-controlled apartment that he's living in but has to give up soon. This would seem to be the answer to their problem over where to live, but it's really too small for two people, and then further tragedy strikes. Well, you know, into each life a little rain must fall and such.
Directed by Ira Sachs
Also starring John Lithgow (last seen in "Conclave"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "Love the Coopers"), Charlie Tahan (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), Cheyenne Jackson (last seen in "United 93"), Harriet Sansom Harris (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Darren Burrows (last seen in "Amistad"), Christian Coulson (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), John Cullum (last seen in "Kill Your Darlings"), Adriane Lenox (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holiday"), Manny Perez (last seen in "Courage Under Fire"), Sebastian La Cause (last seen in "Eraser"), Christina Kirk (last seen in "Melinda and Melinda"), Tatyana Zbirovskaya, Olya Zueva (last seen in "Salt"), Jason Stuart (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Eric Tabach, Tank Burt, Daphne Gaines, Christopher King (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Maryann Urbano (last seen in "Babygirl"), David Bell, Henry Crouch, Jeff Goad, Dovie Currin, Ira Spaulding, Andrew Polk (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Jim Newman, Michael J. Burg (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Josephine Pizzino (last seen in "Birdman"), Alexander W. Smith
RATING: 6 out of 10 late night phone calls
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