Whenever the decaying prospects for original filmmaking in the US finally force him to the hinterlands of prestige television, James Gray should consider adapting The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro’s doorstop biography of New York City master planner Robert Moses. Although Gray’s minor-key cinema of depressives and outcasts seems worlds away from Moses-style titans, his movies are nevertheless all about deals struck, favours granted and accepted. What critics commonly read as the filmmaker’s recurring focus on fathers and sons is more precisely an interest in transfers of power, when the leg up that’s being offered is also pressing down on someone else’s neck.
In (2000), the core of the movie isn’t the chaste, incestuous love triangle of rising stars Charlize Theron, Joaquin Phoenix, and Mark Wahlberg, but rather James Caan’s contractor, master (2006) only wants what’s best for his sons (Phoenix and Wahlberg again), which in his eyes means a life lived in uniform, in his shadow and as shells of their possible selves.
