Two Lovers
USA/France 2008
Starring : Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow
Director : James Gray
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also out in the UK this week : Genova [7/10]; The Damned United [6/10]
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WHEN Two Lovers premiered in competition at Cannes last May, writer-director James Gray became – after Joel Coen – only the second American this decade to compete for the Palme d'Or in consecutive years. The 2007 festival had hosted We Own the Night - a cop-family drama that went on to become one of that year's most accomplished, and most inexplicably underappreciated, multiplex releases.
Both Two Lovers and We Own the Night are set in bleakly atmospheric backwaters of New York City, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man facing a painful dilemma. Last time, the choice was between the excitement of a shady nightclub-management career and the dutiful path of following his dad and brother into the police-force. This time the problem is, as the title suggests, more romantic in nature. But posters for the film showing Phoenix's Leonard as a debonair lothario, torn between the charms of a blonde (Gwyneth Paltrow) and a brunette (Vinessa Shaw), give a misleading impression of the film's tone and content.
Taking its wintry ambience from the Brighton Beach locations in which it was shot – home to the city's Russian and Ukrainian communities, including Gray's own family – Two Lovers is a bracingly downbeat, sombre affair. Struggling to cope with bipolar disorder, Leonard – a talented amateur photographer who works at his dad's dry-cleaning business – finds himself, in his mid-thirties, still living with his parents (Isabella Rossellini; Moni Moshonov.) He quickly becomes besotted with his new neighbour, party-girl Michelle (Paltrow) – even though she has a (married) lover of her own (Elias Koteas) – and barely notices that Sandra (Shaw), easy-going daughter of his father's new business-partner, is head-over-heels in love with him.
Leonard is too solipsistic and inexperienced to realise his amour fou for volatile Michelle can only end in tears – but Gray defuses the situation's latent predictability by adding a final-act development that rivals the similarly ironic and troubling conclusion of We Own the Night. In addition, his film is such an effective and engaging character-study of its tormented, flawed – but, as it turns out, not entirely sympathetic – protagonist that we overlook the fact that most blokes would be delighted at having the pick of such prospective paramours.
Two Lovers may possibly not sound like much on paper, and – just as Phoenix's performance walks a narrow line between inspired verisimilitude and jittery mannerism – Gray runs constant the risk of turning an essentially small-scale story into something overwrought. Instead, aided by We Own the Night's editor John Axelrad and cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay (plus Dana Sano's evocative score and an ensemble of rock-solid performances) he crafts an exquisite miniature that looks certain to figure in this publication's year-end top ten. Taken together, Gray's last two features they confirm him as an unusually talented, understatedly stylish presence on the margins of the current US mainstream: the French apparently regard him as "the next Scorsese," and, hyperbolic as it may sound, it's actually not too hard to see why.
