There’s a well-worn formula for movies about love: find two young, gorgeous people, then have them meet in a cute way, and end with a wedding.
Love is Strange, the fifth feature film from writer/ director Ira Sachs, takes a much different route. It begins with the wedding of two older men: still-aspiring painter Ben (John Lithgow) and Catholic school music teacher George (Alfred Molina). But despite the film’s title, their relationship is anything but strange; it’s practiced, persistent, and nuanced. Ben and George know each other so deeply that they don’t remember how to be apart.
After 39 years together, the couple is finally married in a little New York City park. But when the diocese fires George for his marriage to another man, the newlyweds are forced to sell their apartment and search for something cheaper. In the interim, George crashes on the couch of another gay couple in their building, and Ben stays in the Brooklyn apartment of his nephew (Darren Burrows) and niece-in-law, uptight novelist Kate (Marisa Tomei). Charlie Tahan is terrific as Ben’s grandnephew, Joey, a sullen teenager who does not appreciate the arrival of an elderly roommate.
The film is strongest when it lingers on Lithgow and Molina as they interact with astonishing ease and tenderness. The two characters imbue Love is Strange with a compelling emotional center, though the framework surrounding them sometimes feels thin. Some supporting characters are underutilized and certain plots—Joey’s complicated friendship with a boy from school, Kate’s strained marriage—are either glossed over or abandoned. Or perhaps it just seems that way because scenes with Lithgow and Molina are so interesting and intricate that they outshine the rest in the film. In a particularly striking scene, Ben and George squeeze into a bottom bunk in order to be close to one another. The circumstances of their relationship are always in flux; their feelings are not.
And that’s what makes this otherwise uncooked movie uniquely absorbing. Many films get great mileage from exploring love in all its imperfections. Love is Strange is the opposite: an imperfect movie about a phenomenal love.