Don't blame me if this whole thing falls apart.
Presenting a slice of gay life that hasn't often been depicted on screen, Ira Sachs's Love Is Strange is about a New York couple of long standing (39 years!) that ties the knot now that it's legal for them to do so and the fallout when one of them loses their job as a result. Wishing to stay in the city while they hunt for an apartment they can afford (far from the easiest thing to do under the best of circumstances), Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) have to be separated temporarily since the only one of their friends who can put them both up lives in Poughkeepsie, which is inconvenient. Hence, Ben goes to stay with his nephew Elliot (Darren E. Burrows), a filmmaker with a wife, novelist Kate (Marisa Tomei), and teenage son Joey (Charlie Tahan), while George crashes with their downstairs neighbors, hot cops Ted and Roberto (Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez), an arrangement that is less than ideal for all concerned.
Instead of overdramatizing things, Sachs and his co-writer Mauricio Zacharias emphasize the ordinariness of Ben and George's situation and their at times fraught relationships with their hosts. As Ben confesses to his husband at one point, "Sometimes when you live with people, you know them more than you care to." As he has to share a bunk bed with Joey, whose close friendship with a classmate (Eric Tabach) is raising a red flag for his parents, there is a great deal of truth to what he says. If I have an issue with the story's shapelessness, though, it is tied to Sachs's penchant for holding shots longer than necessary, giving the impression that the film is ending when there's still more of it to come. And the shot he does choose to end on makes me question who the film is actually about. Is it really Ben and George, or is it some mopey, awkward teenager who has to be goaded into talking to a girl he likes? Frankly, I preferred when it was the former.