Fran Magazine: Issue #99

On James Gray

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). The way this works is that Wednesday (regular) issues are free for all and Sunday (dispatch) issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine, and feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd.

Maestro moment (the finale)

After Maestro lost every single one of the Oscars it was nominated for, Bradley Cooper appeared as a special guest star on Abbott Elementary.

A clip like this — loose, funny, mentioned Alias — suggests that after all this Maestro stuff, Bradley Cooper is not mad and actually laughing. Is that true? I think so. I do think Cooper cares about winning an Oscar — which isn’t a crime — but in the sense that he feels he doesn’t have enough public praise for his work. His celebrity friends help him out all the time: they produce his films, they give him notes, they host his screenings. But he’s not really had the groundswell of public-facing industry support that he seems to desire.

Also these two guys tried to see if Cooper was actually even good at conducting, which is funny to watch but I can’t overemphasize how much I don’t actually care whether he’s good at the thing he kept telling people he worked on for six years. I worked on jogging for six years and I wasn’t good at it either!

Here is my place to say: thank you, Bradley Cooper, for Maestro, a movie about a crazy guy with a crazy voice¹ who was bisexual when no one wanted him to be. I have been having fun with Maestro ever since the photos were released of you having an iced pink drink while wearing old age make-up and also directing a film. I look forward to your next movie, and as always, Fran Magazine is available to cover your work going forward.

What was your favorite #MaestroMoment? Sound off below…

Vulture asked what it will take for Cooper to win an Oscar. This is just about impossible to predict. The expansion of the Academy made the voting body more predictable than ever before; it seems that these people decide their metrics for success sometime in December and then never move on. My only other thoughts on the Oscars are in a yet-to-be-published (?) piece on Jonathan Glazer and that Stone’s win — admirable, not undeserving, though obviously not my preferred choice — resulted in a great, beautiful speech.²

By the way

It’s the last day of the Fran Magazine Spring Break Forever sale!! “ACT NOW” — me.

Some notes on completing James Gray’s filmography

Leaving the Criterion Channel — the best streaming service — at the end of this month are a number of James Gray’s New York films, namely The Yards and We Own the Night from 2000 and 2008 respectively, which up until this past week were the only two films of Gray’s that I hadn’t seen.

The first James Gray film I saw was The Immigrant, which I caught in theaters with long time friend of the magazine Cameron Scheetz (I believe). I knew nothing of Gray the first time I saw it, otherwise compelled to see it based on the quality of the cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Renner³) and the premise/setting of Jewish immigrants in 1920s New York City. It’s not as if there weren’t Jewish films and Jewish filmmakers at that time — who can forget the brief Woody Allen “revival” of the early 2010s…, though joking aside we had Nicole Holofcener, Apatow, etc. working in the comedyish sphere — but it did feel like there were a dearth of Jewish dramas being made, or adult dramas that dealt with Jewish identity the way that film does. I recall liking the film, maybe not loving it, though recognizing its quality and boldness, the ending, especially, feeling both totally new but completely classical.

I didn’t think much of Gray after that until The Lost City of Z came out three years later which I again saw with friend of the magazine Cameron Scheetz on the strength of Gray’s interview with Richard Lawson on Little Gold Men. There’s a very clear “before I ever heard a James Gray interview” and “after I heard a James Gray interview” division in my life — where the idea that a modern American filmmaker would be able to speak ambitiously and philosophically about his work while also sounding like a member of my extended family. I think there’s an idea that “understanding film,” not unlike “understanding classical music,” is obscure, esoteric, and frustrating. It really couldn’t be further from that, and one of the things I admire most about hearing Gray talk about his and other works is his ability to speak clearly, conversationally, and enthusiastically for the medium, which is really all you need to get by. For what it’s worth, The Lost City of Z remains, to this day, one of the great films of the past decade⁴ and probably my favorite of Gray’s filmography⁵ — staggering, surprising, dazzling. Plus it’s the only movie to give Robert Pattinson a crazy beard and little glasses:

this still feels really crazy to look at…

Given the first few films I saw of Gray’s all felt relatively epic in scope, perhaps due to their period setting (past, past, and future — in Ad Astra), I was surprised to go back and reckon with his New York films and the way they concern themselves with systems of crime. Gray is less interested in “can you do crime and still be good?” He is not exploring, like, the interiority of Jean Valjean, but his stories of police and organized criminals suggest something we all perhaps acknowledge to some degree now which is that these are one in the same in their systemic functionality. Gray’s 2010s films — The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z, Ad Astra — are not really concerned with “crime” in terms of like, “doing something illegal,”⁶ but they are concerned with questions of goodness, missions, callings.

I think some people struggled at the time of its release with the fact that The Lost City of Z is about a white explorer in South America and making him out to be a tragic hero of his own ambition. What feels prescient and consistent in Gray’s filmmaking is that he’s not asking you to find Charlie Hunnam’s Percy Fawcett a guy that you should put a poster of up on your wall. He’s not your friend, etc. This matter of obsession, however, destroys Fawcett’s life from the inside out — everyone around him is begging him to stop going into the jungle — but he is committed, no matter how much Dudley Dursley⁷ screams “pots and pans!”⁸ at him.

I really enjoyed reading Isaac Feldberg’s interview with Gray and the mention of a George Eliot quote that reads: “The greatest benefit we owe the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.”⁹ Gray describes, in part, what the quote means to him:

Strangely, part of the reason I have to repeat it a lot, aloud to others and to myself internally, is that it’s not in vogue. It’s not what our culture always values. When you're making pictures, either you're doing it with the grain or against the grain—not always consciously, by the way, but you try to stay either unfashionably or fashionably true to yourself.

I thought about this when reflecting on his most recent film, Armageddon Time, which I reviewed favorably for Gawker at the time of its release. I have thought a lot about Armageddon Time since this past October and in the wake of everything that’s been discussed around The Zone of Interest. Not unlike Glazer’s film, Armageddon Time reckons, in part, with indifference as a weapon of upward mobility. The film is loosely autobiographical, recounting a friendship Gray had in his youth with a Black kid he went to school with, whose presents upends his working class, Jewish family life by making them confront their assimilation into white middle class culture. When both boys are arrested, the Gray stand-in Paul Graff takes the blame — but it’s too late, no one cares. His family and the police cooperate to make sure that he gets off, the fate of his friend goes otherwise unknown.

As Nicholas Russell wrote in his essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room:

That Armageddon Time’s protagonist is a child has led to assumptions that the film charts a white boy’s moral epiphany concerning the ills of racism. That Paul is a stand-in for Gray has furthered these criticisms with accusations that Gray is flattering himself via a cinematic depiction of his journey as a conscientious artist. To be sure, there are lessons learned in Gray’s film. The question is whether or not they amount to much for the characters. Throughout, the Graffs and their class peers wield their whiteness willingly, either in opposition to Blackness to avoid association or as a means of demonstrating overall superiority. Both are depicted as cowardly.

I suspect some of the reasons Armageddon Time was a woefully unpopular film last year was the general botching of its release, its failed media campaign, and the fact that a thoughtful, adult drama is not really an engaging medium at this point for people. Beyond that, however, I think what Gray did that was challenging and uncomfortable for many was that he made Jews looks bad. Not in a way that feels anti-Semitic, but in a way that acknowledges the uneasy, miserable process of capitalist assimilation that allowed (some) Jews to ascend and abandon a sense of solidarity with other persecuted communities. Films — and texts, in general — that cope with the trade-offs of being a “model minority” population are hard to come by, and they present unnerving but important opportunities to discuss the ways in which basically everyone is complicit in some aspect of violence (or crime), be it local or global.

Anyway — I am not sure what to bring this all back to besides this image:

We Own the Night (amazing) and The Yards (interesting) leave Criterion Channel at the end of the month — run, don’t walk!

1. But a different kind of crazy voice than he had in the movie.

2. Preceded, of course, by Charlize Theron telling Annette Bening that she’d never never been stung on the face by a jellyfish but watching Nyad she felt like she had.

3. Okay — Renner was not exactly “getting me in the door” with the films of James Gray but I maintain that his performance in this film is one of his four good performances (alongside Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, American Hustle, and The Town — if you wanna argue on behalf of The Hurt Locker or Wind River, that’s fine but I’m probably gonna zone out).

4. And I think a more worthy “David Grann adaptation” than Killers of the Flower Moon… not that that means much…

5. We Own the Night is definitely hovering in the margins. I recently told a friend that the only film of his I really don’t “like” is Little Odessa — his first — which he made when he was 23, so — given I don’t like what most 23 year olds are doing at any given time, Gray gets a pass here.

6. Though The Immigrant does have some of that, but it’s not really “the point.”

7. Character actor Harry Melling.

8. Craziest scene in a movie full of them.

9. Real shades of Amy Sedaris’s entry in the New York Magazine etiquette guide which said to move through the world as if everyone you meet is grieving.