The Yards

(James Gray, USA, 2000)

Every year, there are terrific American films that, for one reason or another, get short shrift in their Australian release. You may be lucky to catch The Yards in a cinema – but that is definitely where its bold, widescreen compositions and haunting sound design can best be appreciated.

It is the second movie written and directed by James Gray, whose Little Odessa (1994) struck me as a mannered and overwrought debut. Second time up, Gray is still interested in issues of family and crime. He once again creates a thick, morbid, melancholy mood in a depressed socio-economic milieu.

The Yards, however, is a great leap forward for Gray. On paper, it may have looked like a mélange of stock situations from films including The Godfather (1972) and Bloodbrothers (1978).

Leo (Mark Wahlberg) gets out of jail and returns to the bosom of his extended family, including Willie (Joaquin Phoenix), whose involvement with the train repair industry has criminal shadings.

The look and sound of this world of the yards – trains and tracks, vast offices and factory floors, houses that barely seem to stand up in dimly lit, misty streets – is finely rendered. Menace and intrigue enter the picture via the machinations of those in charge of this world, including Frank (James Caan). And, through it all, the inner development of the troubled Leo remains something we must strive to intuit.

Gray likes to crank up the elements of his dark plots – ailing mothers, sinister fathers, secret liaisons from the past that threaten to explode present friendships – to a Tennessee Williams level. Yet The Yards, for all its turbulence, is not handled as melodrama.

Gray's camera always keeps a contemplative distance from the grim action, and the delicate mood is never overwhelmed by cheap, bombastic tricks. Atmosphere, mystery and suggestion are everything here.

It is a surprisingly quiet and searching piece. Gray forces us to improve our powers of observation and perception as we scan the wide, often near-empty frame. Unlike so many current films, he does not use dialogue or voice-over narration for simple explication or clumsy underlining. Howard Shore's remarkable music score is often kept at a deliberately low, disquieting volume.

Although it boasts a star-studded cast, the film employs the same kind of democratic openness in relation to its uniformly fine performances. Whether Gray is handling screen icons like Caan and Faye Dunaway, newer celebrities like Wahlberg, Phoenix and Charlize Theron, or indelible character actors such as Steve Lawrence and Victor Argo, he brings out in them all the same hushed, brooding, enigmatic quality.

In the age of histrionic fluff like Requiem for a Dream (2000), Gray comes across as a true classicist – almost an anachronism within contemporary American cinema, which is probably why the film did not set the box office on fire there. The Yards treads no new territory as drama, but in its evocation of time and place, and its termite-like burrowing into a tough moral dilemma, it is special.

© Adrian Martin May 2001