In Love Is Strange, Ira Sachs's story is set in motion by a ripped-from-the-headlines event that could've been parlayed into a by-the-numbers drama: After marrying his same-sex partner of several decades, a sixtysomething teacher is fired from his job at a Catholic high school. But instead of the predictable procession of righteous backlash, courtroom showdowns, and learning and growing, Sachs's film does what people usually do when shitty stuff happens: pick up the pieces and move on. With the instigating antigay firing out of the way in the first 10 minutes of the film, Love Is Strange is free to track the minutiae of the lives of its protagonists, the married couple portrayed authentically by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, who are cast into a scary new world. After the firing, the men are unable to keep their long-standing apartment, and soon find themselves temporarily but terrifyingly homeless. In the film's iffiest plot device, the couple is split up between friends and relatives, with Lithgow's Ben taken in by his married-with-a-kid nephew and Molina's George shacking up with friendly neighbors (a pair of party-loving gay cops, oy). But then things get really interesting. In pacing his film, Sachs alternates between languorous scenes of life being lived and lyrical jumps forward in time, which allow for major plot points to be announced via small conversation. It's similar to the way Richard Linklater moves his Boyhood, but Sachs is even bolder in his deployment of ellipses, steering his characters into discussions of the Big Stuff—the meaning of life, artistic ambition, fidelity—without ever making a scene. Some will say that "not much happens" in Love Is Strange, but the sense of stasis is a ruse. Huge things happen. It just looks like normal life. by David Schmader