James Gray returns once more to the Russian-Jewish milieu of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach for another story of conflicted characters. Joaquin Phoenix, a nightclub manager caught between gangsters and the police in Gray's sombre We Own the Night, here has a much more internalised struggle as a lonely depressive living with his concerned parents, forced to choose between the nice girl thrust on him by his family and the self-obsessed rich girl next door, who uses him as a dumping ground for her emotional baggage and piques his projected fantasies in the process.Phoenix may be another Hollywood actor gone doolally under the weight of the expectation placed on the serious craftsman in a fickle medium - there are uncomfortable echoes of Heath Ledger in his intensity - but there's no denying his skill. Gray plays a dangerous game with his understated approach, particularly with the dialogue, which is life-like to the point of deliberate banality, and it takes an exceptionally intuitive performer to breathe life into a character who, on the surface of things, offers little to latch onto besides his pain.
On the evidence of this, Gray's ploughing of a singular furrow seems to be bringing increasing returns: the emotional stiflement that his 1994 debut, Little Odessa, sought to express now comes across with more articulacy and without needing the crutches of physical violence in the plot. The deliberate ambiguity of interpretation is more confidently defined, and there are some artful little touches in gestures and coincidences which reward careful observation, yet remain wholly inobtrusive. This is American independent film at its most mature.
8/10
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