I’ve always liked James Gray as a director, though I was endeared to him even more by listening to him talk about his family and upbringing in a Director’s Guild interview podcast about Armageddon Time. In his filmography, Two Lovers (2008) feels underrepresented as it was a change from his previous run of New York crime dramas like The Yards and We Own The Night (in another interview I read, Two Lovers was a response to a dare about writing “a movie without any guns”). The film may have been obscured with Joaquin Phoenix’s theatrics and “retirement” from acting that lead into his I’m Still Here prank-doco phase.
Two Lovers is a romantic drama that takes inspiration from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s story, White Nights, which has been adapted into several movies including Robert Bresson’s Four Nights Of A Dreamer, a film I really liked. Here, the New York setting feels lived in and melancholy with its grey interiors and the chilly winter season, and the overall Brighton Beach ambience, all empty boardwalks and parkas needed on rooftop rendezvouses. Phoenix’s forlorn, boyish character Leonard Kraditor has been living with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov) in their apartment for the last four months, no doubt a place that he grew up in. Still suffering from a failed marriage and a love that has disappeared, the opening sequence sees Leonard fail in a suicide attempt, jumping into the harbour water while on an errand for the family. Unable to go through with it, he walks back home soaking wet much to the worry of his parents. He is introduced to Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) on account of a business deal involving her family acquiring his family’s dry-cleaning business. With his parents slowly nudging him into a relationship with Sandra, Leonard also bumps into Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), in the apartment hallway; it’s an intriguing detail that this person he becomes besotted with also lives in the same building. He can gaze out of his bedroom window and see Michelle’s apartment across the tenement courtyard; the glow of lights from her window represents a hope of a life outside of Leonard’s small universe, all of which is captured by Joaquin Baca-Asay’s great cinematography.
Two Lovers is not so much a romantic triangle as a character study of Leonard’s confusion and compulsion, forming a relationship with Sandra even as he harbours greater desire for Michelle. There is enough ambiguity and shading in the character relationships and the dynamics between Leonard and Sandra and Michelle to make it feel different and real (well to me, anyway). Great performances from all, particularly Phoenix who makes sure that even though his character is a “fuck up”, there is something earnest and purposeful in his doomed desire, even if its at the expense of others. The parents are focused on security and business, doing right for their family, while the adult children give into their adolescent whims, follow the heart all the way into a dead end. Or a new start, depending on how you read the emotion of the ending.
Also, when Shaw first steps into Phoenix’s bedroom and remarks, “You’ve got a lot of DVDs here”, I felt that.
Streamed on Tubi. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 