Homecoming

Gray, a "strange kid" by his own account, was brought up in the Flushing section of Queens. He was lonely and not very good-looking. The only things he cared about were the movies and the Yankees. High school girls were not swooning for the 6-foot-2, 135-pound kid with braces and bad skin. School, in fact, wasn't really his thing. Nor was reading, so he'd play hooky and go to the movies -- sometimes seeing two a day.

One theater played strange afternoon double features. "You could see "Bringing Up Baby" and then "Fitzcarraldo," he says. He remembers seeing "Apocalypse Now" and "Raging Bull" during a time he now calls "the last gasp of American cinema," and being mesmerized. He began seeing films by Fellini, Kurosawa and Visconti. And then he got into the University of Southern California Film School.

But even at USC Gray was different. He liked the "arty" directors, while his classmates were into Steven Spielberg. Gray took classes in film theory and history; he took film production classes to learn about different lenses. He made a short film about "sexual discontent," which got him some attention and an agent. After he graduated he looked for something to direct but couldn't find anything he liked, so he decided to write something himself. He sought plot, characters and tone back east in New York.

"Little Odessa," the story of a hit man who comes home to his Russian Jewish émigré family in Brighton Beach, was released in 1995 and won the second-place Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Playboy called "Little Odessa" "impressive" and "poetic," Newsday said it was a "stylishly dark and detached drama" and the New York Times said it was the beginning of a "powerful career." Not everyone was as moved, however. The Portland Oregonian wrote, "Gray offers precious little that audiences aren't bored with already," and Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic called the film "a pointless, predictable clinker."

Immediately after "Little Odessa," Gray started working on what would become "The Yards," telling the Village Voice, in 1995, "It's my 'Rocco and His Brothers,'" Luchino Visconti's 1960 film about a family member returning to the fold and brothers who become enemies.

"The family," Gray told the Voice, "is not always a place of joy and comfort; it can be deadening and horrific."

James Gray is troubled

We are wandering through the train yards in Queens, the location of the pivotal scene in "The Yards" in which Mark Wahlberg, who plays Leo Handler, the prodigal son, has no choice but to beat a cop nearly to death. Leo has returned to the old neighborhood after being released from prison, where he took the fall for a group of his friends. Leo wants to get his life back together. He approaches his connected uncle (who came into the family while Leo was in prison, and who runs a company that repairs subway cars) and asks for a job.

Uncle Frank (James Caan) tells Leo he needs a couple of years of training and sends him on his way. This isn't good enough for Leo, who needs to support himself and his sick mother (amazing Ellen Burstyn), so he hooks up with old friend Willie Guitierrez (Joaquin Phoenix), who does some "alternative" work for Uncle Frank. The cast is rounded out by Faye Dunaway as Uncle Frank's wife, Kitty, and Charlize Theron as Leo's cousin and Willie's girlfriend. Bad things happen when Leo -- out on parole -- is asked to take the fall again, this time for something he didn't do.

The story is a combination of family dysfunction and corruption in the subway yards, and it's ripped from painful moments in Gray's own history. Standing in the yards, the director asks me not to write about the particulars, but says that the events are closely tied to actual events in his family saga -- his mother's fatal illness, his father's involvement with corrupt politicians.

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