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
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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.
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.
The economy sucks, and if you haven’t realized it yet you probably will soon. (Sorry.) If you’re shopping for Christmas gifts but don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of money, DVD’s are just about the best gift to give: they’re easily wrapped, they’re sold almost everywhere now, and watching them kills time.
1. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) A few years before returning to the top of Hollywood with last summer’s Iron Man, Robert Downey, Jr. played a petty thief “discovered” by a casting agent and sent to Hollywood for his big break. Writer-director Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) piles on the dark humor and Raymond Chandler references, creating a smartassed romp through life in Los Angeles that’s both smart and wickedly droll. Val Kilmer co-stars as a gay private investigator, and Michelle Monaghan (Eagle Eye) appears as Downey, Jr.’s starlet sweetheart.
2. Tender Mercies (1983) A pristine music box of a film from a time when Hollywood didn’t mind producing smaller character studies, Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a washed up, alcoholic country singer who befriends a widow and her son while working off a motel bill in a small Texas town. Duvall, scoring something of a comeback after several creatively fallow years, won Best Actor for his performance. Tess Harper (Crimes of the Heart), Wilford Brimley and Ellen Barkin also guest star. Directed by Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy). 
3. We Own The Night (2007) Speaking of Duvall, he co-starred in this overlooked neo-noir masterpiece as the father to two vastly different sons: the black sheep club owner (Joaquin Phoenix, never better) sinking into the Russian mob and the loyal police officer (Mark Wahlberg) who followed in his footsteps. Director James Gray (Little Odessa) constructs the film’s early-1980s drug wars setting with such visceral detail that you forget you’re watching a period piece. The car chase set piece halfway through is the best of its kind since William Friedkin’s heyday.
4. The Gift (2000) Cate Blanchett stars as a widowed mother and psychic in a small Southern town, dismissed and tolerated by police until she begins envisioning the murder of a spoiled debutante (Katie Holmes). Director Sam Raimi, working from a script co-written by Billy Bob Thornton, assembled a powerhouse ensemble cast including Greg Kinnear, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi, Hillary Swank, and Gary Cole as the local town folk. Though the impoverished, seamy look on beauties like Blanchett and Swank sometimes strains believability, the performances make up for the extra stretch of imagination.
5. Desperate Hours (1955) Humphrey Bogart plays an escaped convict holing up in the suburban home of a businessman (Fredric March, Seven Days In May) until he can make a clean getaway. Director William Wyler (Ben-Hur) pits his two leads – Bogart the movie star, March the craftsman character actor – against each other in a series of confrontations that build like a slow-boiling vat of tar. Based on a true story that eventually led to a Supreme Court decision regarding privacy and libel laws.
6. Enemy At The Gates (2001) Director Jean Jacques Annaud (Seven Years In Tibet) made World War II’s Eastern front look so crushingly violent and bloody that it’s no wonder Hollywood hasn’t really visited the subject before or since. Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes are Russian soldiers defending Stalingrad from the Nazi onslaught; Ed Harris is the German aristocrat sent into the devastated city to outmatch Law’s hero-of-the-people marksman. Brutal in a way that doesn’t wallow in its gore, but jarring nonetheless: you’ll feel every shot. Rachel Weisz and Ron Perlman also star, while Bob Hoskins steals all his scenes as a y0ung Nikita Khrushchev.
7. 61* (2001) One of the great sports legends, in 1961 New York Yankees teammates Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle simultaneously raced to break Babe Ruth’s 60-home run season record. The made-for-HBO film precisely renders the pressures each player faced, especially the plain-spoken Maris’ (Barry Pepper, Seven Pounds) struggle to escape the negative image given him by the press. Thomas Jane (Boogie Nights) co-stars as the golden boy Mantle just sinking into the vices that would dog his career; lifelong Yankees fanatic Billy Crystal directs.
8. Insomnia (2002) Hoo hah! Al Pacino is a cop with a troubled past and Robin Williams the killer he’s come to Alaska to hunt in director Christopher Nolan’s (The Dark Knight) neo-noir in the land of the midnight sun. Watching Pacino go slowly out of his mind from sleep deprivation while not overacting (well, for him, anyway) is a wicked pleasure. Williams, working on his early-00′s sabbatical from playing doctors and teachers, is quietly terrifying as an arrogant killer. Nolan again raises what could have been a routine genre exercise into art, loosely remaking Norweigan director Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s 1997 original with the same name.
9. While You Were Sleeping (1995) Starring a busload of people we miss seeing, this romantic comedy has Sandra Bullock’s subway worker lying to the family of her comatose, unrequited love (Peter Gallagher) as a way of staying close to him – until she falls for the guy’s earthy brother (Bill Pullman). The late, much-missed Peter Boyle and Jack Warden co-star at their cantankerous best. It’s a little difficult to believe, in this week of Marley & Me and Bedtime Stories, that films just thirteen years ago were this lacking in cynicism. Warm-hearted, sugar-coated fun – the archetypal chick flick.
10. Three Days of the Condor (1975) A nebbishy CIA drone (Robert Redford) returns from lunch and finds all his co-workers murdered and himself the chief suspect. Desperately taking a woman (Faye Dunaway) hostage until he can contact his superiors, he soon finds the agency itself is trying to kill him. The centerpiece of Redford’s 70s partnership with director Sydney Pollack – the same collaboration that produced Jeremiah Johnson and The Way We Were - the film also wrote the playbook for a legion of imitators through the 80s and 90s. And there may be sexier film duos than Redford and Dunaway, but not many. 
