James Gray is a filmmaker with exquisite sensibilities. As he has demonstrated with Little Odessa, The Yards, and We Own the Night, he has great empathy for damaged souls trapped in emotional isolation, struggling to deal with their private fears and insecurities while a densely-populated metropolis (and their family and friends) buzzes around them, oblivious to their debilitating pain.
Yet he keeps getting tripped up by narrative conventions that have either been imposed upon him by the commercial demands of his financiers or by his own personal desire to try and tell a straightforward, traditional story.
So it is with his latest film, Two Lovers, which opens today in selected US cities and is available for home viewing on selected cable and satellite systems via Video on Demand. It approaches a Dickensian level of coincidences and contrivances, to the point where I wished that Gray would simply toss aside the script and concentrate on the character details that he captures so well.
It is in those quiet moments that Gray catches lightning in a bottle, beginning with the restrained, nuanced performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow as neighbors who are both dealing with unrequited love.
Of course, the two lovers are not in sync. Leonard (Phoenix) pines for Michelle (Paltrow), who pines for Ronald (Elias Koteas), while Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) pines for Leonard. There's enough pining and yearning for an entire 26-episode soap opera, which Two Lovers begins to resemble.
Leonard is initially depicted as a suicidal loner. He's a downtrodden thirty-something man living temporarily -- four months already! -- with his parents (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York, and working dispassionately in his father's dry cleaning business. It's hinted that something bad happened in his recent past, an implication that is confirmed when he meets Sandra. It seems that a serious, previously undisclosed medical condition caused his fiancee to cancel their engagement, and Leonard is still recovering. His parents, who are entering into a business arrangement with Sandra's parents, arrange for the children to meet at dinner. Sandra is lovely and demure, a "nice girl" approved by his parents, but she also is attracted to Leonard.
That potential romance is barely underway when Leonard and Michelle meet in the hallway of their apartment building. Michelle seems to be outgoing and vivacious, and Leonard jumps at the chance to join her and her friends when they go nightclubbing. His budding, lustful hopes are dashed when Michelle reveals her relationship with Ronald, a partner in the law firm where she works. Ronald is married and has a child, but keeps promising to leave his wife for Michelle. Leonard settles for Miss Right Now, bedding the pliant Sandra.
The premise is instantly reminiscent of dozens of other films. (My thoughts strayed to the John Hughes-scripted Some Kind of Wonderful, as well as Sydney Pollack's Tootsie, though I'm sure you can think of other examples.) In Gray's hands, however, Leonard and Michelle are weighed down with frightful amounts of emotional baggage. Each is fragile and quietly desperate, neither one really knowing what's best for their emotional stability, but relying on somebody else to fill the hollow inside.
What brings the film down, though only to a degree, are creaky plot machinations, beginning with the wish-fulfillment fantasy that the morose Leonard is able to attract two beautiful women in a very short time without doing any thing! Fortunately, that happens in the first few minutes, so if you can overlook that, the characters take over the tale for a good, long, leisurely haul. It would be nice to get more insight into Sandra (who is amazingly kind, nurturing, and, truth be told, winningly naive) and Ronald (who doesn't seem like such a bad fellow for someone who's been cheating on his wife for years), or even to hear more about Leonard's parents (who appear to have a fascinating backstory). But the story is about Leonard and Michelle, and it's told entirely from Leonard's point of view, so in that sense we're funneled into his limited perspective. He is obsessed with himself and his needs, and the rest of the world be damned.
Gray is reaching for tragedy, but Two Lovers must settle instead for slow-boiling melodrama. That's not to damn the film with faint praise, however; it's a welcome sight to watch a mostly-realized drama in which recognizably imperfect human characters are grappling with their own mortality, battling emotions and inherited tendencies rather than werewolves and zombies.
So this depressed Joaquin Phoenix then not crazy, rapping Joaquin?