“The Love Is Strange” cast stops by TheWrap’s video lounge at Tao in Park City

Is America ready for a mainstream story about a middle-aged gay couple who face troubles once they finally marry? In “Love is Strange,” Ira Sachs’ new drama, Alfred Molina loses his job as a choir director in a school after he finally marries his longtime partner, played by John Lithgow.

Also read: TheWrap’s Sundance Film Festival Complete Coverage

The cast of the movie, including Lithgow, Molina, Sachs, Marisa Tomei and Darren E. Burrows came to TheWrap’s video lounge at Sundance to talk about the movie, which has been greeted high emotion along with several other films dealing with marriage equality.

Check out this video and a few others that highlight the work of our classmate, Ira Sachs, and his latest movie, Love is Strange. Love is Strange has been really well received at the Sundance Film Festival. Congratulations Ira!

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A review from the Hollywood Reporter

The latest film from director Ira Sachs ("Keep the Lights On") stars Alfred Molina and John Lithgow as a gay couple, alongside Marisa Tomei, Darren Burrows and Cheyenne Jackson.

A gay couple who have been together for almost four decades are separated -- at least physically -- by factors beyond their control in Love Is Strange, the latest tender and meandering exploration of human relationships from indie darling Ira Sachs (Keep the Lights On, Forty Shades of Blue).

Set in the Big Apple, this is a sprawling yet intimate narrative, constructed almost entirely of in-between moments rather than the big turning points and tragedies. The starting point is the housing problem of two newlyweds but longtime lovers, played with enormous generosity by Alfred Molinaand John Lithgow, but the film slowly expands its vision to encompass a much larger cast that includes Marisa Tomei and Cheyenne Jackson.

An experienced boutique distributor will know how to make the most of this cast and story, and this Sundance Premieres title should also appeal to other festivals, especially on the queer circuit, which is always starved for films about gay men who stopped caring about their six-packs long ago.

Love Is Strange opens on what should be the happiest day in the lives of Ben (Lithgow) and George (Molina), as they get ready in their tasteful Manhattan apartment for their wedding. Initially somewhat counterintuitively, Sachs ensures that everything looks rather ordinary: they get up, shower, dress, are running late and can’t find a taxi. Indeed, as will become clear from the film that follows, this is not the happiest day in their lives exactly because the duo, who’ve been together for 39 years, have mastered the art of being happy with what they have, every single day.

Thus, the vows are dispatched in a scene under a minute long, and the marriage celebration takes place in the couple’s apartment and feels like any number of parties they must have had with friends over the years. Wedding guests include Ben’s nephew, Elliot (Darren Burrows, from Sachs’ Forty Shades of Blue), a busy businessman; Elliot’s wife, Kate (Tomei), a novelist who works from home; their teenage kid, Joey (Charlie Tahan), and the two party-loving gay cops who live in the lovebirds’ building, Roberto (Manny Perez) and Ted (Jackson).

When news of the marriage reaches the ears of the New York archdiocese, George, who’s a Catholic school music teacher, is fired, and the couple is forced to sell their apartment. When finding new lodgings takes longer than anticipated, they ask their friends for a roof over their head, resulting in the separation of the two, with Ben staying in Brooklyn with Elliot’s family, where he shares a bunk bed with Joey, and George offered the couch at Roberto and Ted’s downstairs.

Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias, from Lights, get the familiar humor and half-evoked memories that are so typical of long-term relationships exactly right, and a short scene in a historic gay bar is not only funny and real but also casually reveals some of the core values that have kept this couple going for all these years. That said, the rather strange living arrangements of the two, divorced physically if never emotionally, is one of a number of elements that has to be accepted for the film to work; a makeshift mattress for two somewhere would have turned this into a short, and Sachs never suggests why a teenager without siblings might have a bunk bed in the first place.

VIDEO: 10 Moments That Rocked the Sundance Film Festival

But more important things ring true, starting with George and Ben’s relationship, which is an inspiration for people like Elliot and Kate, both too absorbed by their work to really follow their only son. Lithgow and Molina are impressively tuned into the material and each other, and Tomei and the young Tahan deliver the film’s other heartfelt, fully rounded performances. Burrows and especially Perez and Jackson are given less to do, and there’s a sense something of their stories ended up on the cutting room floor.

The soothing and occasionally quietly soaring music of Chopin, heard throughout the film, helps set the right tone for this understated drama. Cinematographer Christos Voudouris (Alps) gives the characters room to breathe but is also intimate when necessary, while editors Michael Taylor andAffonso Goncalves string the series of small moments together with grace, turning the film into a quietly effective overview of relationships, feelings and outside occurrences that simply have to be dealt with.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
Production company: Parts and Labor
Cast: John Lithgow, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Darren Burrows, Charlie Tahan, Cheyenne Jackson, Manny Perez
Director: Ira Sachs
Screenwriters: Ira Sachs, Mauricio Zacharias
Producers: Lars Knudsen, Jay Van Hoy, Lucas Joaquin
Director of photography: Christos Voudouris
Production designer: Amy Williams
Costume designer: Arjun Bhasin
Editors: Michael Taylor, Affonso Goncalves
Sales: WME/Fortissimo
No rating, 94 minutes

Some more coverage from Indiewire

Sundance Review: Ira Sachs' ‘Love Is Strange’ Is A Brilliantly Performed Romance That’s Always Real

REVIEWS

BY JAMES ROCCHI
JANUARY 20, 2014 12:08 PM
1 COMMENT

Directed by Ira Sachs ("Keep the Lights On," "Married Life"), "Love Is Strange" depicts a New York love affair whose depth of feeling is only matched by the length of its duration. George (Alfred Molina) and Ben (John Lithgow) have been together for 39 years, and as the film begins, they’re fussing and getting ready for a big event—after all these years, they’re finally going to (and for that matter, finally able to) get married. It’s a beautiful day, and George and Ben are surrounded by family and friends and well-wishers, but it turns out to be one with consequences. With his marriage a matter of public record, George loses his job teaching music at a Catholic private school for violating the Archdiocese’s code, and so the devout, decent George is out of a job, with the two forced out of the apartment they bought, unable to keep paying its only-in-New-York array of co-op fees and other obligations entailed. And so, while they look for an affordable apartment in New York, they have to stay with family and friends—separately, with Ben staying with his novelist niece Kate (Marisa Tomei) and her family, and George staying on the couch in the apartment Kate’s son Ted (Cheyenne Jackson) shares with his boyfriend.

If "Love Is Strange" were nothing more than as showcase for its performances, it would still be superlative; Lithgow and Molina are perfect not just as Ben and George, but also as the combination they make with each other. It has been noted that early couples say “I love you” with the force of a thousand exploding suns, but that long-standing couples say “I love you” in a way that can also ask, unspoken, if it was you who happened to leave the goddamn garage door open again. That kind of love is rarely seen on film, and hard to portray when it is; Molina and Lithgow make that happen here, with all of the feeling and fights and closeness that a real couple would have.

But Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias also talk—seriously—about New York economics, subsidized housing, prejudice’s more socially acceptable forms and how the rent is, in the words of the sage prophets, too damn high. George and Ben are an older gay couple, friends to some and relatives to others, and Sachs and Zacharias make sure that we see every aspect of their lives in its complexity and wholeness.

There’s one slight flaw in "Love Is Strange," and at the same time, it’s substantial: we never really get a sense of exactly how long Ben and George have to impose on their friends, whether in titles or dialogue or even something as simple (and as real) as Tomei shouting at Lithgow that it’s been X amount of time and she’s had it. This may seem a small observation, but anyone who’s had—or been—a houseguest is familiar with the idea expressed in the Italian proverb that “After three days houseguests and fish both start to smell.” When you are hosting or being hosted, you keep track of every second with mental clock the size of Big Ben. Again, it’s a small thing, but it’s also exactly the thing the real-world version of this story would involve.

And even that can’t dispel the pleasures of the film completely—its gentle humanity, its heartbreaking portrait of a couple kept apart, its dry wit and completely earned tearjerking moments. Love, as the writer Carol Shields observed, is a republic, not a kingdom, with all eligible for its favors and subject to its laws. And "Love Is Strange" shows the work that living in that republic can require, and how hard it can be to keep love alive in a world where prejudice is real as rent and a quiet life of companionship can be as difficult to find and keep as an affordable apartment in Manhattan. Calling "Love Is Strange" a great gay love story is both precise and inaccurate; I doubt I’ll see a more finely performed and beautifully crafted love story, with or without any mere modifiers, up on the big screen this year. [A-]