The Long Gray Line: Returning to The Yards

By Andrew Tracy

As a means of telling us about our world, classical narrative cinema—that is, American narrative cinema—has been steadily losing ground. James Agee’s faith in the scenario seems somewhat quaint in the midst of our fascination with hybridity. Documentary, whether interacting with, contravening, or simply prolonging fictional devices, has become the yardstick for measuring the fiction’s legitimacy. Social and political import now travels in the curious yet complementary company of a rejuvenated neorealism and authorial reflexivity, while the duties of “pure” narrative are increasingly relegated to telling us about itself. The formalist revolt against the Hollywood white elephants of the ‘40s and ‘50s is with us still. The notion that narrative is inherently compromised, particularly when dealing with political topics, has sunk deep into the critical psyche: the almost libelous scorn directed at such recent items as The Constant Gardener, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Syriana is too pathological to originate only in disagreement. Even when celebrated, classical narrative film can no longer simply be received, or even interpreted; it must be unveiled.

This suspicion in the critical realm has aided and abetted the solipsism of today’s debased auteurist ethos. If content is only so many plastic signifiers, then the only basis for evaluation is their better or worse manipulation. American narrative film, or at least that narrow stream of it which pretends to seriousness, is being progressively reduced to the status of fetish object. Which makes perpetual bète noire Miramax’s release of a new “Director’s Cut” edition of James Gray’s The Yards (2000) both welcome and somewhat incongruous, coming from the studio that produced that almost Benjaminian relic Kill Bill (2003-4). Ignored by audiences, and regarded in kinder or harsher light by most critics as a junior-league Godfather, The Yards does little to refute that charge with the presence of James Caan (as well as fellow ‘70s stalwarts Ellen Burstyn and Faye Dunaway), the gorgeous, Gordon Willis-esque photography of Harris Savides, and the broodingly lovely, Rota-reminiscent score courtesy of Howard Shore (with major contributions from Gustav Holst’s 1918 Planets Suite).

Like his contemporary and studio-mate Tarantino, Gray has steeped The Yards in the textures of ‘70s cinema, though his sophomore effort’s critical dismissal, after the qualified success of his equally grim debut Little Odessa (1994), perhaps indicates that derivation is only worthy of praise as long as it is flaunted rather than absorbed. In any of the passing notices the film has received, there has been a manifest refusal to view The Yards in any context outside of its intertextual relation to other movies, a shortsightedness which is reflexively blamed upon the film. Gray’s obvious debts to Coppola, Scorsese, and Kubrick obscure anything he might have to—in that much-maligned word—“say” about the lovingly detailed Queens milieu he has clearly limned from both memory and acute observation. Gray hardly exaggerates when he refers to his rather staid film as something of an “anti-movie”: its unselfconscious seriousness, its evident faith that the world can be understood through telling stories about it, removes at one fell swoop any critical cachet to be gained from getting behind it. Though exquisitely well-made, The Yards is neither stylistically nor thematically novel; though grounded in social reality, it’s too closely wedded to Gray’s sense of classical tragedy, classical Hollywood, and classical opera to function as social document; it’s too traditional to be innovative, too emotional to be political, too Hollywood to be indie. And six years on, it’s still the best American movie of the decade.

That kind of contentious and contestatory claim, however, is almost antithetical to the film’s delicate mastery (as an aside, Claude Chabrol last year chose The Yards to accompany a retrospective of his work in Turin). It’s telling that Gray and his co-writer Matt Reeves abandoned their original conception of a splintered narrative related from four perspectives: newly released ex-con Leo (Mark Wahlberg), returning home to his mother (Burstyn) and extended family; Willie (Joaquin Phoenix), his best friend, whose unintentional murder of a subway yardmaster sets the film’s tragic orbit in motion; Frank (Caan), Leo’s new uncle and Willie’s boss, knee-deep in transit authority graft; and Erica (Charlize Theron), Leo’s cousin, Willie’s fiancée and Frank’s resentful stepdaughter. That kind of narrative gimmickry might have garnered the film more notice at the time of its release, fitting snugly into the schematic sequence mentality that marks much of what passes for serious American filmmaking. This politics of isolation might be the most unfortunate, and pervasive, legacy of Gray’s ‘70s icons: powerful depictions of insular worlds developing, in their heirs, into powerfully insular worldviews.

What distinguishes The Yards from most of its contemporaries—and many of its forebears—is the way it depicts a community and a society, taking shape from the sum of these individual isolations. Unlike Coppola’s famous cinematic clan, turned ever more inward as they are forced and fitted to symbolize ever more outward, the troubles of The Yards’ nameless, splintered family radiate away from their centre—the rifts and complexities of their dark world intertwine with larger worlds, deeper darkness. What Gray gives us in The Yards is a ground’s-eye view of America in action: of class difference and class determinism, of crony capitalism, of the sheer everydayness of graft and corruption; of racial divides and social taboos; of the vanishing world of American manufacturing, American labour, and American community life, disintegrating at the behest of forces outside their control.

That Gray’s tragic vision doesn’t devolve into shallowly ironic despair is a testament to his acknowledged stylistic model and his film’s true spiritual father, John Ford, whose frail communities derived even greater pathos from their perch on the brink of fragmentation. But where Ford illuminated and artistically prolonged a brief moment of the past’s crystalline possibility, Gray shatters it in the present with the swiftness ordained by the weight of history, the inexorable movement of social forces which Ford saw in inception. When two-time loser Leo, standing by while Willie and his crew sabotage their competitors’ work at the yards, is suddenly accosted by a cop, the horrible inevitability of the moment—accentuated by Gray’s quick zoom into the numbed desperation on Leo’s face—is akin to a collision of planets played out in slow motion. The few seconds it takes for Leo to beat the cop into unconsciousness and take flight—witnessing Willie’s murder of the yardmaster, for which Leo will be accused—appropriately takes place in long shot, a mere coda to an event long predetermined. Later, a gun pressed into his hand outside the comatose cop’s hospital room, Leo—his introversion and inarticulateness given heartbreaking eloquence by Wahlberg—chokingly utters “I feel like I’m gonna fuckin’ die.” A mantra for Gray’s dying world and the sad, damaged people clinging to it, striving for the homes which their harsh environment has denied them.

A Fordian theme, that, if there ever was one, and if Gray plays out the dream’s tragic underside rather than its fragile realization, he tinges it with the same quiet beauty and tenderness. No less than narrative, emotionis still a rather suspect quality these days. Even those contemporary filmmakers who can evoke it most strongly often do so from an ironic or abstract distance, as a relation between viewer and film—a formal relation—rather than between characters. For Gray, following Ford, those intranarrative emotional bonds, their expression and resolution, are both the weft substance of his film and the means to understand it, articulating the complexities and contradictions of the film’s world rather than masking them. Leo’s criminal past which separates him from his devoted and devastated mother (Wahlberg and Burstyn have a wonderful rapport together), and his secret love for Erica; Willie’s unspoken need to escape from his ethnic roots; Frank’s ill-fit with what his business success has bought him—listen to how Caan reveals Frank’s entire upbringing by a casually dropped expletive in his office, or an incongruously homey admonition (“Clean Plate Club, kids”) in his palatial, mini-Corleone dining room—and his slow discovery of what he might be capable of to preserve it; Erica’s hunger for a home and family of her own, which burns even stronger than her love for the man she seeks it with. Combining and interacting in the relentless progression of the film’s tragic arc, these rich and diverse emotional textures, captured so poignantly by Gray and his actors, flesh out the world above and below the film’s inevitable narrative line. And the autonomy, the intense privacy of those desires and sufferings, is what makes the brief moments of union resonate so strongly, the beauty and sadness of these burdens shine most bright. At film’s end, in the midst of irreparably damaged lives, an embrace between two minor characters carries more emotional charge, and tells more about the film’s world, than any final scene in recent memory outside of the Dardennes’ L’enfant.

There’s less disparity in linking Gray with the premiere narrative filmmakers of our time than one might think. Where Ford’s people could find, however briefly, a material order and spatial expression of their emotional ties, those of Gray’s New York and the Dardennes’ Seraing can find their homes only when all else is lost, when the social moloch which they tentatively courted has engulfed the space around them. Despite its genre trappings, The Yards, no less than Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002), or L’enfant, is about the realities of work, and thus about all that follows in its path: money, class, politics, power. The America Gray shows us is governed by the same rootlessness and alienation it produces in its people, abstracted into total moral disengagement as it moves from social affliction to social function. A prominent civil servant feels no unease about stripping himself and his partner in graft naked to guard against wiretapping; crooked deals are literally brokered in backrooms, the invisible aura of power (and the sartorial elegance) of the participants a marked contrast to the drabness of their surroundings; euphemisms and verbal evasions insulate the powerful from the reality of their actions. A metaphor for larger political chicanery, a symbol of greater ills? Sure—but why bother with analogy when the actuality is right in front of us? The film’s subtleties are not there to be decoded, but to contribute to the whole, to the living cinematic space etched with such specificity and assurance. Particularly in his interiors, Gray exhibits an almost Langian sense of how urban space reflects and shapes urban reality, how the operations of power manifest themselves in the homeliest locations no less than the halls of authority.

Gray hardly requires such lofty comparisons or grand readings to justify his artistry, however. The Yards speaks volumes only to the extent that it remains terse and concentrated, stripped of the excesses which its feted antecedents so indulged. Gray’s excision of the release version’s final courtroom scene—whose radical atonality is reminiscent of John Garfield’s concluding voiceover in Abraham Polonsky’s similarly uncompromising Force of Evil (1948)—in his new version (the only significant change in this rare director’s cut that is shorter than the original release) is almost unnecessary. The scene’s patent studio imposition only points up the organic conception of all that came before, while its brilliantly successful playing, even in its emotional and narrative illogic, attests to the whole’s tremendous clarity.

That kind of clarity—which some deride as blatancy—is anathema to certain segments of today’s critical contingent. It demands recognition more than decipherment, appreciation more than advocacy. Even in his avowed modesty, Gray cuts off critical squabbling at the knees. His film cannot be parsed, broken down, or interrogated. Its rigorous focus and its embracing generosity demand, completely external of its own intentions, that we choose sides. Consider the higher ground taken here, even with its pitfalls. As with the Dardennes, The Yards begins to be betrayed the moment we magnify it beyond its borders. The paradox is that it allows us to do no less.

The Yards

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