"ONE lover, ah ah ah..."

From its somnambulistic opening, a slow-mo Joaquin Phoenix shedding his dry cleaning delivery along a pier and calmly plunging into Sheepshead Bay, his mind’s eye imagining a woman forlornly leaving a home, Two Lovers establishes its pervasive tone as that of fatalistic, romantic depression.  Phoenix is Leonard Kraditor, a young Brighton Beach man with emotional problems whose previous suicide attempt forced him to live in his parents’ apartment and to work for their dry cleaning business.  In quick succession, two love interests enter his life: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the level-headed daughter of a potential business partner; and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the flighty, blond shiksa neighbor who just wants to be friends and is carrying on with a married man at her law firm.  The film concerns Leonard’s violent emotional oscillations from one to the other and back again, negotiating the direction of his future.

As simple and as melodramatic as that scenario sounds, Gray, no stranger to highly interiorized male obsessives, plays everything straight, earnest, and true.  His three previous films, Little Odessa (1994), The Yards (2000), and We Own the Night (2007), feature protagonists caught between the lure of familial, domestic respectability and an unknown, possibly dangerous escape from such traditional arrangements.  Crime plays a crucial part in delineating the main character’s options, even if the assumptive connotations of law and order are hazy; in We Own the Night, for instance, even the suffocating, metallic production design of the NYPD makes it far less appealing than the warm and sensuous hedonism of police chief’s son-cum-nightclub manager Bobby Green (Phoenix).  Green’s eventual capitulation into his father’s footsteps, more or less forced by police raids against the syndicate owning the nightclub and lethal gangland reprisals, comes with a deadening loss of vitality and love, symbolized by the breakup with his supportive girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes).  Rarely has such a presumptively “happy” ending come with a more spiritually emptying compromise.

This decisive choice, shorn of the elegiac violence and generic gangster tropes that had Gray pegged earlier  as a Russian-Jewish Scorsese, is also at the heart of Two Lovers.  The lack of criminal element, unless “crimes of the heart” count, makes the stakes of Leonard’s dilemma entirely emotional and, so, potentially exaggerated and outlandish.  Leonard pursues Michelle in particular as a kind of adolescent crush, waiting by his cell for her texts and discreetly following her to ensure that they “accidentally” run into each other. Yet certain plot and design details and aspects of Phoenix’s remarkable performance complicate a one-dimensional reading of Leonard.    In a throwaway detail in dialogue few other movies would attempt, it turns out that Leonard and his former fiancée (the woman from his vision at the opening of the film) tested positive as recessive carriers of Tay-Sachs disease, meaning their children would undoubtedly inherit this fatal genetic disorder most readily identified with Eastern European Jews.  With his own biology, inextricably bound up with his cultural heritage, standing in the way of emotional fulfillment, Leonard’s moroseness, as well as his enthusiasm for the decidedly non-Jewish Michelle, comes better into focus.

Gray has over the last fifteen years nearly perfected a mise en scene of constricting domesticity that makes its most insidious appearance in Two Lovers.  Each of his films is at least moderately set within alternately cluttered and inviting hotels, apartment complexes, and offices that trap their inhabitants in amber.  The Kraditors’ residence is most distinguished by a long hallway from the door through the center of the apartment, allowing Gray to frame his characters in cramped spaces against a wall adorned with hanging portraits of the family’s history.  Taken from a famous moment in Rosemary’s Baby, a touchstone for Gray’s own brand of “apartment horror,” the camera can also sometimes neglect to follow a character behind a door or corner, leaving a viewer absorbed, stranded, and straining to see around the bend.  Despite the warm and homey lighting, the architectural cues are of unconscious repression from which Leonard, perhaps despite himself, craves to escape. Gray is known for a throwback sensibility pointing to the luminaries of the late 60s/early 70s “New Hollywood,” and he shows his allegiance to the defiantly personal, serious cinema of Hal Ashby, Jerry Schatzberg, Bob Rafelson, and others, with unself-conscious, quietly virtuosic long takes, camera movements, and adherence to character above all else.  There’s also an eerie if pervasively comforting neon blue hue emanating from cell phones, camera flashes, computer screens, and other outlets for Leonard’s increasingly obsessive energies.

Phoenix has never been better than in Gray’s films, but his work in Two Lovers is nonetheless revelatory. His characters in other films so far have been curious mixtures of adult physicality and stunted emotion, ranging from the teen in To Die For, to the fiery, quasi-incestuous Commodus in Gladiator, to the brave, soft-spoken Lucius in The Village; Leonard continues that line while presenting unexpected depths of feeling and wells of charisma.  For a while he seems like the lonely artist type, showing Sandra his black-and-white photographs, she observes pointedly, with no people in them.  Then he meets the vivacious, equally unpredictable Michelle, goes clubbing, and gets ensnared as a close male friend/spy to discover her married lawyer lover’s real intentions.  Torn this way and that, from being the good Jewish son to venturing into troubling and exciting territory with his blond goddess, Leonard is impossible to get a firm grasp on.  He’s like Poppy, the central figure of last year’s Happy-Go-Lucky, in that a viewer spends the entire film reevaluating his preconceptions.  Poppy begins looking blindly and unbearably optimistic, but as she meets resistance to her personality from all comers, a more complete understanding of her worldview forms.  So it is with Leonard, whose opening suicide attempt colors all understanding of his character, but who can likewise unexpectedly try to become an impromptu break-dancer and rapper  when he needs to impress. ¹  Sometimes he seems like a shuffling, forthright creep; other times he’s a sympathetic lost dog simply trying to find his way against the vicissitudes of fate.  Phoenix’s haunted face, sunken eyes, and constant intensity, whether brooding or boiling over, lend credence to his three-dimensionality.

"...TWO lovers, ah ah ah!"

Two Lovers inverts the established James Gray paradigm of the two brother figures and a female significant other, instead internalizing the two brothers into Leonard and giving his central choice more romantic overtones.  Gray has had unbelievably good luck casting stunningly gorgeous women in his previous films, notably Moira Kelly (Little Odessa), Charlize Theron (The Yards), and Eva Mendes, and the eponymous “two lovers” here are no exceptions.  Gray realizes that “[i]t’s hard as hell for a man to write female characters,” ² and it’s true that his females tend to symbolize for the male protagonist an escape from a crippling home life into self-actualization. However, there have been numerous traces of these women struggling to escape the frame, and Theron and Mendes clearly made their destinies their own against the wishes of their lovers. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Michelle is just as lost and ill-fitting in her upper class world as Leonard is in Brighton; she takes pills to get high, he takes pills to calm down.  She’s luminous even when harried by the trials of her other relationship, perhaps a reason why he latches onto her kindred spirit. As Leonard sees her more and more as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, it becomes painfully clear that he is willing to go to outrageous lengths to bring the reality and the fantasy together, and that she may be crazy enough to let him.  Sandra is an altogether more grounded presence, sweeter, more “normal,” and perhaps not nearly exciting enough to raise Leonard from his stupor.  Vinessa Shaw is so lovely and likeable but unfortunately bound up in the conformity by which Leonard thinks he is so obviously crippled, that her fate seems as out of her hands as Leonard’s biology is out of his. Watching over it all with motherly warmth and feminine grace is the ageless beauty, Isabella Rossellini, as Leonard’s mother. All of Gray’s protagonists have been notorious mama’s boys, usually rushing to their mothers’ sides in times of medical crisis or else, in We Own the Night, emotionally stunted by their absence.  Rossellini’s multivalent presence, sometimes conveying sternness, playfulness, or shrewdness, sometimes all at once, is part of the film’s rich texture of character. To wit, what makes Two Lovers the writer/director’s most accomplished and bittersweet film to date is that there aren’t any real villains, except perhaps for Leonard’s recognizably human desires that threaten to veer him from his life’s preordained trajectory.

In the climactic moment of decision, echoing the film’s opening and the conclusion of cinema’s greatest coming-of-age tale, The 400 Blows, Leonard stands on the threshold of an uncertain future.  Whether his choice is the correct one, from a practical or romantic standpoint, is finally up to the viewer to decide.  For my money, the final moments befit Phoenix’s dreamy, moody performance and the poignant but invigorating effects the three women in his life have had on it.

Edited by Matt Schneider.