The Yards

Originally published on 07/11/22 on Letterboxd

The shadows of Miller and Kazan haunt its spaces, permeating and aggregating more and more of the frame until it resembles something malignant, like black mold, coating the faces of the worker and the capitalist alike with industrial decay. These shadows are offset only by the flickering sallow fluorescence of neoliberalism, robbing what might have been a heroic act in Old Hollywood of any beauty or grace, casting them as futile attempts to derive something human from a system that has become indistinguishable from an economy and within which the rot started before anyone even noticed. Gray's compositions may be classical, but even the most breathtakingly tragic of these tapestries of dynasty cannot prevent the incoming freight train of modernity from bulldozing everything in its way, leaving the survivors to cling desperately onto the doors in the hopes that it might take them far enough to let them forget where it came from.