DVD of the Week: “The Yards”

In eager anticipation of James Gray’s forthcoming film “The Nightingale” (formerly “Lowlife”)—a drama set on the Lower East Side in the nineteen-twenties, based in part on the diaries of his grandfather, who ran a bar—it’s worth recalling an earlier incarnation of Gray’s bruising, family-centric New York street poetry, his 1999 feature “The Yards” (which I discuss in this clip). It’s the first of Gray’s four films with Joaquin Phoenix, who brings a silently furious pain to his role as a swaggering egotist. It’s in the script, and it has to do with Gray’s eternal subject, family and identity. In “Two Lovers,” Phoenix played one of the most radically fractured characters in the modern cinema, bringing a profound and ardent anguish to the part of a young man, not quite so young anymore, who’s coping with mental illness but knows well how much life he’s missing out on and reaches desperately to try to get it. His performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” is more brilliant—showiness is built into the subject of the film, and that’s one of its great virtues—but it isn’t deeper. Here, speaking last December at the Museum of the Moving Image after presenting “The Yards,” Gray discussed his approach to acting. As for “The Nightingale,” the release date hasn’t been set yet.