Going Home Again With James Gray In "The Yards"

Gray’s exquisitely mournful crime melodrama begins with a young man, fresh out of prison, on a New York City subway train bound to Queens.

Spoilers henceforth for “The Yards.”

The man in question, Leo Handler (played by a downbeat and soft-spoken Mark Wahlberg), is going home, where his relatives are throwing a party for him. The sad truth is that there is precious little to celebrate in Leo’s life, and almost assuredly not in the place he calls home, depicted by Gray as a dead-end wastelan…