DVD Review: Two Lovers

One of the year’s best dramas arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.

Writer-director James Gray’s Two Lovers opens, as his previous We Own The Night began, with a succinct visual metaphor of what’s to come. Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply troubled young man draped in heavy winter clothes, throws himself off a pier into an icy body of water. Pulled to safety by passers-by who witnessed his plunge, he remains dumbstruck, unable to express gratitude for their efforts to save his life. Those themes of hopes rejected and stalled self-destruction form the backbone of the film’s searing character study and help establish it as one of the past year.

Skittish and sorrowful, Leonard stands on shaky ground both in his head and in his life. Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and numbly devastated by an engagement that ended with ruthless logic by his lover’s family, he’s returned to the Brighton Beach home of his parents (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) with nothing more ambitious in mind than working for their dry cleaning business and keeping to himself. The Kraditors are moving ahead, however, on the verge of merging their business with that of the neighboring and prosperous Cohen family. As a way of cementing the union, both sets of parents wouldn’t mind if Leonard struck up a romance with the Cohen’s smart, sensitive daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw).

Leonard and Sandra’s early flirtation is tentative, halting, almost childlike, and you get the sense that such gentle charm uses about all the energy Leonard can manage. That ennui changes once he meets his fiery upstairs neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who’s come to live in their fortress-like Brooklyn apartment house as a kind of voluntary exile rendered by her boss and lover Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas). Leonard is instantly transfixed by Michelle, who’s a beauty in the most painfully Daisy Buchanan-esque sense: always promising, in an elusive way, something great in return for love and devotion. Leonard pursues her to the best of his ability but finds his attentions first gently ignored and then rebuked. Disappointed, he pulls Sandra further into his orbit, settling into a comfortable relationship with her until the opportunity to win Michelle rears its dangerous head once again.

Gray co-wrote the script (with Ric Minello) based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” and that author’s thoroughly downbeat worldview is well-suited to Gray’s visual vocabulary, which interprets Brooklyn and Manhattan alike as vast mazes of dreary buildings occasionally brought to ephemeral life by splashes of light and color. Gray’s films are always romantic in tone if not in attitude, and their characters are kept in almost chiaroscuro proportion to the urban megaliths surrounding them. That Two Lovers is set largely near the steely Atlantic during wintertime only heightens the sense of lifelessness surrounding the human drama. But unlike his earliest films (Little Odessa and The Yards) here Gray is getting more proficient at achieving a balance between the two contrasts. With Two Lovers the setting works in service to the characters, not the other way around.

Those characters, for their part, are played well and without ostentation, though some cast members inhabit their roles more than others. Phoenix gives Leonard a fragility that makes his vacillation between Michelle and Sandra not just believable but tightly suspenseful. The scenes in which Leonard attempts to fit in with Michelle’s group of clubbing friends is almost heart-rending to watch. Likewise Sandra’s futile attempt to convey her tenderness to Leonard, especially with a third-act gift that’s symbolic on probably a half-dozen different levels while simultaneously thumbnailing her character. Shaw is an underrated actress capable of showing great volume of emotion with the simplest of body movements, and here she takes a part that in lesser hands would have been irretrievably bland and makes a fleshed-out character worth liking – even loving, as we come to hope Leonard will.

Paltrow’s career has been dogged by skepticism for years, and in making Michelle both attractive and then repulsive she has in some ways the heaviest load to bear. By and large she succeeds, though in some scenes – as in her moments alone on the wind-swept rooftop with Phoenix – she seems to hold too much back; there’s a sense of a missing depth that might bring both characters into greater clarity. Of course that might be the fault of the script, but as everything else is planned and executed with clockwork precision such an oversight seems unlikely. Michelle is a woman who can’t get past her own selfishness to believe in anyone else’s sincerity. She’s a time bomb, one probably everyone but Leonard can recognize as such. Paltrow never quite lets that danger materialize.

Rossellini, regal even when talking on the phone, gives perhaps the film’s most poignant dialogue late in the film. Without spoiling anything, anybody who’s ever left home will recognize what she says as exactly the words you want to hear upon departure. It also arrives just as the events of the story collapse in on themselves, making what’s still to come seem as bitter as the winter wind howling around Leonard as he returns to the waterfront. 

The ending is raw, uncompromising, and multi-faceted. Everyone – almost everyone – gets what they want, which in the finest Russian literary tradition only seems charged with the potential for more misery. Whether you approve or agree with Leonard’s final decision, you can’t argue with its logic or question its unconventional contrast to most Hollywood dramas. You’ll definitely have an opinion about it, though, one way or another. Two Lovers is a movie audacious enough to make you think.

-Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

(Note: An earlier version of this review originally ran for the film’s theatrical release.)

Five Good Books That Should Be Great Movies

Great novels that are due and overdue for a leap to the big screen.

Ignatius Reilly, the poster child for Development Hell

Books, as we’ve said before, are like movies that play in your head. Good books are movies you don’t mind watching over and over again on the screen in your mind. The film industry has appropriated all kinds of books virtually since its inception, taking material from the best fiction and nonfiction as well as from the lowest genre potboilers. There’s just no way of predicting how a book will translate: Hollywood has made masterpieces out of humble paperbacks but also made garbage of bona fide classics. Films and movies aren’t exactly alike, but they’re close enough in structure and pacing that it’s sometimes hard to believe filmmakers could screw up excellent source material. But they manage.

We were excited by recent news announcing that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels are headed for filming soon, at last bringing two classics of science fiction into cinema. The following is five additional examples of worthy books we’d like to see on the screen, if only so that cinema’s much wider audience can take notice of their superb stories. Just for the sake of variety, we’ve tried to include samples of literature of many different styles and periods.

Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard (1987) Shepard’s Cold War thriller is part horror tale, part allegory and part military war epic, forming a mosaic of genres typical of his strange genius. Set amid a U.S.-led guerrilla war in Central America, the story follows infantryman David Mingolla as he joins an elite cadre of psychic tacticians but finds his fledgling abilities much much vaster than he realized, allowing him to bend reality to his will and challenge the other psychics manipulating world events. Suggested cast: We imagine Jeremy Renner (The Unusuals) playing Mingolla, with Vinessa Shaw (Two Lovers) as his adversary and kindred spirit Deborah. Imagine the film as: A cross between Scanners, Apocalypse Now, and The Matrix. Ideal director: David Cronenberg.

The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy (1988) A homophobic sheriff’s deputy, a mafia thug and an anguished investigator desperately pursue a brutal serial killer through McCarthy-era Los Angeles while communists, gangsters and politicians jockey for power. The second and arguably the darkest of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” cycle of novels, it’s similar in tone and structure to L.A. Confidential but even bleaker and more cynical. And its ending, for better or worse, is anything but “Hollywood.” Suggested cast: Ryan Gosling (Fracture) stars as the self-loathing Deputy Danny Upshaw, alongside Michael Hogan (Battlestar Galactica) as repentant enforcer Buzz Meeks and Dean Winters (Oz) as weary crusader Mal Considine. No one on Earth should be allowed to play the monumentally evil Dudley Smith except James Cromwell, who nailed the same role in L.A. Confidential. Imagine the film as: Chinatown, Body Double and Manhunter combined. Ideal director: James Gray.

Five Skies, by Ron Carlson (2007) Three men – a petty criminal, a recent widower, and a Hollywood construction foreman – work at building a stunt ramp beside a gorge in the Idaho wilderness, all so that a female stunt driver (think Danica Patrick) can jump the ravine on Pay Per View. The three men confront their past as the ramp slowly takes shape and form. Suggested cast: Damian Lewis (Life) stars as the guilt-ridden foreman Arthur Key, alongside Chris Pine (Star Trek) as thief Ronnie Panelli and Sam Elliott as the heartbroken Darwin Gallegos. Imagine the film as: The Wages of Fear and Tender Mercies merged with Days of Heaven. Ideal director: Terrence Malick.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford  (1927) Easy to visualize as a costume drama with an edgy anger to it - an antidote to the huffing and puffing Oscarbait of recent years – Ford’s Victorian Era novel swirls around two married couples spending weeks together over twenty years at a German spa. The titular good soldier, Edward Ashburnham, is a perfect English gentleman except for his almost compulsive need to seduce women – including his friend’s wife. Long praised as an influential work both for its structure and style, the book was previously a 1981 telepic, so its time has easily come round again. Suggested cast: Liev Shreiber (Defiance) and Cate Blanchett (Bandits) play Ashburnham and his lover Florence Dowell; Robert Downey, Jr. costars as the cuckolded John Dowell alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) as Leonora Ashurnham. Imagine the film as: A mix of Last Year At Marienbad, The Ice Storm, and The English Patient. Ideal director: Michael Winterbottom.

Night Train, by Martin Amis (1997) Amis’ critically-lauded 1997 fling with the hardboiled detective genre features an alcoholic, emotionally crippled police detective trying to solve the apparent suicide of a beautiful scientist with every reason to live. The investigation takes a turn for the darkly existential, and Amis twists conventions further by making the troubled detective a woman, too. The novel’s abrupt ending is like two fingers joliting out of the page, poking you in the eyes. Suggested cast: Laura Linney (Breach) plays the self-destructive Detective Mike Hoolihan, Amy Adams (Enchanted) plays the deceased Jennifer Rockwell, and Paul Schneider (Away We Go) co-stars as Rockwell’s lover and suspected killer Trader Faulkner. Imagine the film as: The Pledge, Prime Suspect and Laura compressed into a brainy whodunnit. Ideal director: John Dahl.

- Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Here we are now! Entertain us!

Seven unsung films from the first half of the 1990s, our generation’s gilded age.

The 90s were so great, even Mike Myers was cool.

To paraphrase the old cliche about the 1960s, if you can remember the 90s you probably wish you were still there. Described as “the best of times” by at least one historian, it was a decade of unheralded prosperity and at times tremendous naivete. It was also often much darker than that, an era whose popular culture was at times strangled by the superficial, obsessed with appearances, and in many ways the foundation of today’s cynical approach to nonthreatening, non-challenging entertainment pablum. Find a problem with mass culture today and it probably began in the 90s, including not least of which this damned Internet fad.

For film enthusiasts and scholars, the decade was a treasure trove. If not quite ever matching the artistic successes of the 1970s, the 90s at least offered a Silver Age of film craftsmanship and experimentation. The burgeoning indie film movement had yet to become the big business it’s mutated into now, and the major studios were still willing to take occasional chances on risky projects such as Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991) and Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995). New directing talent such as Quentin Tarantino, James Gray, and David Fincher all began their careers, while many of the veteran filmmakers and stars of the 70s continued putting out quality work.

The following are seven films that were released between 1991 and 1995, more or less the heydey of marketing strategies aimed squarely at the so-called Generation X, though this list is not limited purely to films aimed at that demographic. Rather, it’s meant to illuminate the lesser known but no less noteworthy films of the time, so more famous works – i.e. Pulp Fiction, Reality Bites and its imitators, The Shawshank Redemption – here suffer a small case of benign neglect.

Ruby In Paradise (1993): Among the earliest darlings of Sundance, this low-budget, low-volume drama about a Tennessee woman (Ashely Judd, in her breakout role) fleeing an abusive husband for the relative beauty of off-season Panama City, Florida won raves for its emotional honesty and realistic characterizations. Defying the modern female protagonist stereotype, Judd’s Ruby is not wise beyond her years, spunky, or even whimsical. She’s complex, clever, and curious instead – harder to demonstrate on film, though Judd nails her performance. It’s time for a DVD re-release.

Rush (1991): Remember Eric Clapton’s comeback song “Tears In Heaven”? It was actually composed as the theme to this bleak based-on-truth drama about undercover Texas narcotics detectives (Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh) falling in love and getting hooked on smack while trying to bust a local drug kingpin (Gregg Allman). Eventually, the strung out pair resort to falsifying evidence to close the case. Not a cheerful film to watch, and more in keeping with the gritty cop films of the 70s than the fast-talking wiseguys that comprised much of 90s crime cinema, nevertheless it’s still gripping viewing.

Patric was for many years a popular public choice to play Jim Morrison – a role that eventually went to Val Kilmer in Oliver Stone’s turgid The Doors (1992). The trailer above shows his uncanny resemblance to the dead singer in full effect.

Single White Female (1992): Leigh starred or co-starred in no less than ten films between 1991 and 95, so it was probably only a matter of time before she crossed paths with the era’s similarly prolific Bridget Fonda. That teaming came in Barbet Shroeder’s (Reversal of Fortune) psycho roommate thriller Single White Female. Playing with equal mean-spirited glee on Fatal Attraction-inspired genre expectations as well as Fonda’s and Leigh’s respective good girl and vamp screen images, it nevertheless falls apart near the end, when some unconvincing psychobabble tries to redeem the preceding tawdry fun. Still, it’s a great pastiche of the era’s twentysomething angst. The trailer below is virtually a time capsule, including voiceover (like many of the trailers in this piece) by the late, great Don LaFontaine.

Bob Roberts (1992): Tim Robbins’ creative output has dwindled in the current decade, and as a result his ballsy body of work from the late 80s and early 90s is slowly getting forgotten. Robbins wrote and directed this caustic, tortuously prescient mockumentary about a charmingly evil Senatorial candidate who wraps his neo-Nazi dogma in Bob Dylanesque folk songs and faux-rebellious swagger. No less than Gore Vidal portrays Roberts’ hapless opponent Brickley Paiste, a character based in part on Senator Ted Kennedy. Much of the film was improvised and drawn from both This Is Spinal Tap and the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, weaving social and political commentary together with a wry assassination and conspiracy subplot that kept period audiences guessing and will keep current viewers ruefully shaking their heads. The film concludes with Roberts winning the election with 52 percent of the vote.

Dazed & Confused (1993): A sensation among critics who were just old enough by the mid-90s to remember what high school was like in the mid-70s, Richard Linklater’s nostalgic but honest look back at the summer of 1976 remains a mellow jolt of fun. And much like its spiritual ancestor Fast Times At Ridgemont High a decade before, the film was a finishing school for the decade’s indie film mainstays, including Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg, Rory Cochrane, Joey Lauren Adams and Nicky Katt, as well as featured appearances by bound-for-mainstream stars Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, and Matthew McConaughey. More about mood and setting than character or plot, the film remains merely a fun diversion, though its slacker aspirations never pretend to anything greater.

Kalifornia (1993): Stone’s Natural Born Killers got all the attention in the decade’s “serial killers hit the open road” sweepstakes, overshadowing this Dominic Sena (Swordfish) directed thriller. A pre-X-Files David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes (Homicide: Life On The Streets) play urbanite intellectuals (he’s writing a book on serial killers) who pick up redneck serial killer Brad Pitt and his girlfriend Juliette Lewis while visiting famous murder sites cross-country. The film is deliberately 70s-esque in its approach to its subject matter and showcasing realistic characterizations – probably why the more simplistic Killers got all the public adulation. Now, why Forbes wasn’t a bigger success as a femme fatale we’ll never understand.

Strange Days (1995): Exploiting the decade’s pre-millennial tension, Kathryn Bigelow’s taut near-future suspenser cast Ralph Fiennes as the awesomely-named Lenny Nero, an ex-cop turned dealer in illicit virtual reality videos. Stuck with a tape showing a powerful rapper/social reformer (Glenn Plummer) assassinated by the LAPD on the eve of the millennium, Nero tries to use the tape as leverage in getting back the singer ex-girlfriend (Lewis again) who dumped him years before, ruining his life. Even if the virtual reality angle is woefully outdated by now, Bigelow’s expert mood construction as well as ace acting by Fiennes, Angela Bassett and others – including Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner as the last cops in the world you want pulling you over – make the film unmissable, even a troubled decade-and-a-half later.

Next Wednesday we’ll return to the era of the early 90s and explore some of the worst films of that period. In the meantime, please post your own additions to this list in the comments section.

- Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Review: Two Lovers

An exquisite romantic drama from burgeoning master craftsman James Gray.

James Gray’s Two Lovers opens, as his previous We Own The Night began, with a succinct visual metaphor of what’s to come. Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply troubled young man draped in heavy winter clothes, throws himself off a pier into an icy body of water. Pulled to safety by passers-by who witnessed his plunge, he remains dumbstruck, unable to express gratitude for their efforts on his behalf. Those themes of hopes rejected and self-destruction stalled form the backbone of its searing character study and help establish the film as one of the year’s best so far.

Skittish and sorrowful, Leonard’s on shaky ground both in his head and in his life. Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and quietly devastated by an engagement ended with ruthless logic by his lover’s family, he’s returned to the Brighton Beach home of his parents (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) with nothing more ambitious in mind than working for their dry cleaning business and keeping to himself. The Kraditors are moving ahead, however, on the verge of merging their business with that of the prosperous Cohen family. As a way of cementing the union, they wouldn’t mind if Leonard struck up a romance with the Cohen’s smart, sensitive daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw).

Leonard and Sandra’s early flirtation is tentative, halting, almost childlike, and you get the sense that such gentle charm is about all Leonard can manage. That changes, however, once he meets his upstairs neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a charming but needy young woman who’s come to live in their fortress-like Brooklyn apartment house as a kind of voluntary exile rendered by her boss/lover Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas). Leonard is instantly transfixed by Michelle, a beauty in the most painfully Daisy Buchanan-esque sense, the kind that’s always promising, in an elusive way, something great in return for love and devotion. Leonard pursues her to the best of his ability but finds his attentions first gently ignored and then rebuked. Disappointed, he pulls Sandra further into his orbit, settling into a comfortable relationship with her until the opportunity to win Michelle rears its head again.

Gray co-wrote the script (with Ric Minello) based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” and that author’s thoroughly downbeat worldview is well-suited to Gray’s visual vocabulary, which interprets Brooklyn and Manhattan alike as vast mazes of dreary buildings occasionally brought to ephemeral life by vivid splashes of light and color. Gray’s films are always romantic in tone if not in attitude, so that their characters are kept in almost chiaroscuro proportion to the urban megaliths surrounding them. That Two Lovers is set largely near the steely Atlantic during wintertime only heightens the sense of lifelessness surrounding the human drama. But unlike his earliest films (Little Odessa and The Yards) here Gray is getting more proficient at achieving a balance between the two contrasts. With Two Lovers the setting works in service to the characters, not the other way around.

Those characters, for their part, are played comfortably and without ostentation, though some cast members inhabit their roles more than others. Phoenix, his recent over-publicized eccentricities notwithstanding, gives Leonard a fragility that makes his vacillation between Michelle and Sandra not just believable but tightly suspenseful. The scenes in which Leonard attempts to fit in with Michelle’s group of clubbing friends is almost heart-rending to watch. Likewise Sandra’s futile attempt to convey her tenderness to Leonard, especially with a third-act gift that’s symbolic on probably a half-dozen different levels while simultaneously thumbnailing her character. Shaw is an underrated actress capable of showing great volume of emotion with the simplest of body movements, and here she takes a part that in lesser hands would have been irretrievably bland and makes a fleshed-out character worth liking – even loving, as we come to hope Leonard will.

Paltrow’s career has been dogged by skepticism for years, and in making Michelle both attractive and then repulsive she has in some ways the heaviest load to bear. By and large she succeeds, though in some scenes – as in her moments alone on the wind-swept rooftop with Phoenix – she seems to hold too much back; there’s a sense of a missing depth that might bring both characters into greater clarity. Of course that might be the fault of the script, but as everything else is planned and executed with clockwork precision such an oversight seems unlikely. Michelle is a woman who can’t get past her own selfishness to believe in anyone else’s sincerity. She’s a time bomb, one probably everyone but Leonard can recognize as such. Paltrow never quite lets that danger materialize.

Rossellini, regal and commanding even when talking on the phone, gives perhaps the film’s most poignant dialogue late in the film. Without spoiling anything, anybody who’s ever left home will recognize what she says as exactly the words you want to hear upon departure. It also arrives just as the events of the story collapse in on themselves, making what’s still to come seem as bitter as the winter wind howling around Leonard as he returns to the waterfront. 

The ending is raw, uncompromising, and multi-faceted. Everyone – almost everyone – gets what they want, which in the finest Russian literary tradition only seems rife with the potential for more misery. Whether you approve or agree with Leonard’s final decision or not, you can’t argue with its logic or question its unconventional contrast to most Hollywood dramas. You’ll definitely have an opinion about it, though, one way or the other.

-Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

In Case You’re Just Joining Us…

Links and recaps of our favorite and most popular posts.

Pictured: WordPress

WordPress, benevolent deity that it is, lets its bloggers monitor lots of features about their blogs, including their most popular blog entries. Lately we’ve been getting a lot more traffic than we used to, especially for some of our comic-book related articles. We can’t say that’s especially surprising – character speculation is often the bulk of the fun surrounding a comic book film. A few others are getting noticed around the Intertubes, too, and that’s also great with us.

These are our most popular and also some we think deserve more recognition so, please, pay attention. Presented in no particular order of importance:

1. Since we’re supposed to be an “online journal of dissent,” we should mention some reviews in which we diverge from popular critical response. We bashed Revolutionary Road for the overreaching mess that it was and loathed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as a formless and largely pointless chick flick in epic film clothing. On the other hand, we liked The X-Files: I Want To Believe and continue to champion the work of writer-director James Gray.

2. We featured seven lesser known comic book adaptations last October. That post includes video of each goofy, inspired, or goofily inspired effort, some of which are cringe-inducing and some are charming in their own weird way. Trust us when we say that until you’ve seen Dr. Strange’s afro in his clip, you can’t truly appreciate the 1970s. We also have David Hasselhoff playing a part recently done by Samuel L. Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal as an ersatz Superman. And if that’s not quality blogging, what truly is?

3. For that matter, our piece in which we give Hollywood a plot, suggest a director, and even cast The Flash’s jump to the big screen is getting a lot of traffic the last couple of weeks. We’re glad for that, since we were  up many a night getting each casting choice just right. And while we’re hijacking story meetings, our picks for ten villains for the third Batman movie has also met with a pretty great response.

4. We did a post about why most films set in and around the Civil War absolutely suck. It’s not our most popular piece, but it’s been getting some attention lately and we’re glad for that. Including it here is a bald attempt to keep that going. Seriously, of all film genres and all of America’s wars, the Civil War seems to get the shortest shrift when it comes time to make a film, despite big budgets and big stars willing to tackle the material. Oh wait, that’s actually sometimes part of the problem.

5. One of the fringe benefits to thinking about movies all… the… damn… time is that you start to remember smaller or less-remembered films that you want to share with friends or, for that matter, anyone who comes to your blog looking for pictures of Hellboy or Leo DiCaprio. (Lots of people do.) Our list of five movies that deserve a DVD release was an effort to get at least a handful of those kinds of movies a little more attention. Last summer’s make Your Own Film Noir box set collection was another. We even made a list of movies for the holidays.

If this if your first visit to the blog, thanks for checking us out. If you’re an old fan, thank you very much and sorry for the delays we sometimes can’t manage to climb over. In either case, please watch more movies. That’s what we plan to do.

- Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Preview: Two Lovers

Crime auteur James Gray shifts gears with new romantic drama.

Having previously worked exclusively in the New York crime film sub-genre, writer-director James Gray shifts creative gears with the new ensemble romantic drama Two Lovers. If that sounds like an unusual change of course, fans of his previous films – Little Odessa, The Yards, 2006′s under-appreciated We Own The Night- will recognize the budding auteur’s trademark color palette and visual vocabulary right away in the trailer below. And of course there’s also the presence of Joaquin Phoenix, Gray’s designated leading man.

Two Lovers, loosely based on among other sources the Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” also reveals a growing ambition for the upstart filmmaker, as it’s potentially the most emotionally complex work of his career. Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) returns to his Brooklyn home after getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov) are preparing to sell their dry cleaning business to their neighbors the Cohens, and suggest to that end that Leonard begin a courtship with the family’s daughter (Vinessa Shaw). That budding romance, built on tenderness and compassion, is set against Leonard’s rising passion for his energetic neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the kept woman of a businessman (Elias Koteas) who misuses her affections. Obviously, much of the dramatic tension turns on Leonard’s choice of women.

Gray’s films often frustrate film goers and critics alike. His bleak visual style, in which endless shades of grays, browns, and blacks surround the characters and only sometimes reveal bursts of color, is admittedly something of an acquired taste. His actors, Phoenix especially, give low-key performances, and combined with the dreary settings his films’ end results are routinely dismissed as leaden or ponderous. Nevertheless, his confidence and his proficiency in conveying emotional complexity have grown by leaps and bounds with each film, and there is a distinct, if not exactly welcoming, narrative voice taking shape throughout. Gray is primarily interested in the unspoken distance between his characters, and a recurring theme in his work suggests that freedom of choice is often only illusory because circumstances (like the monolithic cityscapes surrounding them) confine them past the point of any real hope of action. 

All of which makes him an apt fit to bring anything by famously miserable Russian literature patriarch Dostoevsky to the screen. Gray’s also assembled his best cast yet to tackle the material. Phoenix has grown impressively as an actor throughout his career (His best performance to date, not coincidentally, was in We Own The Night.) Paltrow has labored for years in projects unworthy of her screen presence, while Rossellini and Koteas improve any film in which they participate. Shaw was memorable in her brief turn in 2007′s 3:10 To Yuma; a standout performance could likely present a breakout.

Finally, depending on the accuracy of some reports Phoenix is quitting acting, part of a larger ongoing story that actually doesn’t merit elaboration. But some early reviews point to his turn here becoming a perfect career coda if those rumors are true. Two Lovers opens in limited release this Friday.

-Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Review: Pride And Glory

Norton, Farrell in a clumsy genre exercise chock full o’ derivation.

Not to get too theoretical, and not to oversimplify, but in most cases genre pieces qualify for their genre by exhibiting or implying a certain amount of elements that are recognized as elements, or “forms,” of the genre in question. Identifying these elements, sometimes called “tropes,” is for movie critics and fans often simply an act of intuition. There are also cases where a film carries so many tropes that they’re unmistakably part of their genre and nothing else. By extension, it’s possible to theorize that a film that carries more tropes than any other might be said to be the “most” of its genre.

On that basis, Pride and Glory should qualify as the most Irish-American-New York-cops-in-moral-quandary movie ever. Except there’s a giant difference between “done” and “done well,” and the film manages to successfully pull off almost none of its elements, though pretty much each one evokes memories of better films where they were used with greater grace and less amateurish abandon. A loud, copying, and unconvincing movie with no real point except its own bombast, its combined effect isn’t just bad – it’s actually a discredit to the genre to which it aspires.

Edward Norton plays Ray Tierney, a NYPD detective lying low in the Missing Persons division because of a sketchily drawn episode two years in his past (The audience is never told exactly what.) When four detectives in the department’s 31rst Precinct – captained by his brother Frances (Noah Emmerich)  – are killed in an arrest gone awry, Ray’s father (Jon Voight) demands Ray join the task force assigned to swiftly catch the drug dealer (Ramon Rodriguez) believed responsible. But the investigation, through a series of coincidences and scenes apparently intended to give the cast something to act about, quickly expands to include the family’s brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell) and his three squadmates.

What ensues is the kind of plot that’s not so much a story as an amalgamation of other stories blended together without regard for structure. There’s betrayal, and murder, and of course innocent people caught in the middle. But Gavin O’Connor’s (Miracle) direction puts one scene right after the other with little in the way of mounting suspense: one thing happens and then another and another. The plotline is straightforward, even if the tension is thin. And with a 125-minute run time, there’s a lot of scenes, many of which mostly contain people staring laser beams into one another or swearing as if vulgarity was getting outlawed the next morning. Ray and Jimmy’s final confrontation in a deserted Irish bar is laughably forced, as is Jimmy’s death at the hands of an angry mob minutes later.

Grand theft movie: Emmerich

One thin sliver of beauty arrives about halfway through, when Francis presents his dying wife with a Gaelic band promising “love eternal.” It’s a sweet scene, played expertly and without bathos by Emmerich and actress Jennifer Ehle, that detracts from the rote events happening elsewhere in the plot. In fact, coupled with a later scene of Francis defusing a hostage situation, you might wish the movie was about Francis and starred Emmerich’s perfectly-tuned performance, instead of Norton’s and Farrell’s faux macho histrionics. Emmerich (The Truman Show, Beautiful Girls) has made a career of playing non confrontational beta male types; his performance here is a revealing breath of fresh, unmannered air.

Nothing on TV: Voight, Farrell

As for the stars, Norton’s performance is no more and no less than adequate to the task at hand. By this point in his career he’s forged a definite screen persona, made from equal parts of his turns in American History X and Fight Club, and now he’s beginning to stick by it. Farrell possibly took the part of Jimmy as an opportunity to play a bad guy; but why, then, is so much of his performance a weird, half-hearted Robert DeNiro impression? Farrell has also become the kind of movie star, it seems, that HAS to have a redemptive death, even when playing the heavy. It also doesn’t help that at least one scene seems shunted into the script by O’Connor and co-writer Joe Carnahan (Narc) in order to give Farrell more screen time. Voight, who should know something about difficult children himself, brings a definite weight to his scenes as the bewildered father, even if his dialogue is relegated to standard plot-facilitating exposition: “I want you on this task force!”; “He was always the thinker, always solving problems.”

Serpico-esque: Norton

I talked a lot at the start of this review about derivation and influence, and to close I’d like to recommend seven films whose influence on Pride And Glory was palpable and immediately obvious. Watching any of these – or watching them all – is certain to be a more rewarding use of time. They’re in no particular order, though I’ve listed three of Sidney Lumet’s films first, for obvious reasons: Serpico (1973); Night Falls On Manhattan (1997); Prince of the City (1981); Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981); Assault On Precinct 13 (1976); Force of Evil (1947); Monument Avenue (1998). I’m sure there’s more, but these came to mind first. And though it’s too contemporaneous to really act as an influence, last year’s far superior We Own The Night, directed by James Gray (Little Odessa), used many of the same forms and the same influences to startling, virtuoso effect. Actually one of last year’s best dramas, it’s worth looking at just for its own sake.

-Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::