Review: Two Lovers (4/5)

Two Lovers
(James Gray):
Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow,
Isabella Rossellini, Vinessa Shaw
Running time: 100 minutes (15A)

The jury’s been out on Joaquin Phoenix. It’s as if something has been missing. You sense often an actor who is almost great and who has starred in too few great films. Yet he has a demeanour that seems purpose-built for the cinema. There’s his physical presence: graceful yet strong-boned, that round face framed by high forehead and square jaw. He’s sturdy in a way that seems he had to fortify his own defences. For Phoenix, amidst that dark Puerto Rican smoulder, is a guarded soul. His eyes are green yet shine black, as if he were shielding great pits of despair. His mouth is thin and closed. He talks with marbles in his mouth. Sometimes he talks as if he can’t speak. The words are squeezed out as if he can’t quite shape what it is he is feeling. There’s a bit of Brando in his mumbled mystery; a bit of De Niro in his guard. Till now, he’s been pent-up promise.
Excusing I Walk The Line, most of Phoenix’s best work has been with James Gray (The Yards and We Own The Night). They’ve stuck with each other. Now something special is emerging.
There’s a stunning moment in Two Lovers where Gray puts the camera so close to Phoenix that it trembles. Phoenix’s head is quivering and monstrously silent. It glowers dark like a thundercloud about to strike the ground with electricity.
That moment is typical of Two Lovers. It’s a movie potent with melodrama yet always held in restraint. It opens in Brooklyn, with Leonard (Phoenix) throwing himself off a bridge. And then he decides to get back out of the water. Leonard is depressed and nursing a broken heart. He noodles with photography but mostly just helps out at his parents’ dry-cleaning business. He has moved back home, where his folks fearfully smother him (Isabella Rossellini as his mother proves inspired casting: it’s as if she’s channelling the spirit of her own mother, Ingrid Bergman, and that very quiet, noble suffering.)
Leonard’s parents have set him up with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the forlornly beautiful daughter of a business partner. She sees something she wants to nurture in the guarded Leonard. Meanwhile, outside the apartment, Leonard meets Gwyneth Paltrow but doesn’t have time to run back inside. You wait for her to offer him tips on healthy living. Instead, her Michelle is a cauldron of turmoil. Her blonde smile hides a damaged soul and Paltrow is an unexpected treat: her character doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.
Leonard strikes up a relationship with Sandra but can’t help being drawn to Michelle. Sandra feels a deep need to mother Leonard. Leonard feels a need to nurture Michelle. But Michelle, who is in love with a married man, is like a mythological Siren. She lures Leonard’s drifting heart onto jagged rocks.
The story is inspired by the Dostoevsky short story ‘White Nights’. (Visconti turned it into White Nights in 1957.) And it’s a wise step for Gray. Freed from crime cliché and the notion of trying to ape Francis Ford Coppola, Two Lovers steers him into very different territory. Indeed, it’s a place much closer in spirit to Sophia Coppola and her film Lost in Translation. Gray has found a voice and a gift for steering intimate exchanges. He zones in here on the push and pull of the heart and deeper unconscious motivations. His characters are literally drowning in emotional currents outside their control.
Phoenix’s performance is measured in the way you get to know someone. At first he’s all physical presence: a nervy guy who walks with a tic in his step. And then you begin to sense his bottled heartache. He draws you into his mind. He becomes a tantalising character, someone strange and delicate who lives on after the film.
The dialogue, co-written by Gray and Ric Menello, revels in verbal foreplay. Not snazzy screwball but something tentative and awkward. It delights in the mystery of unsure early love. Gray shoots a scene on a rooftop, where the wind is a sad howl, and the camera watches Leonard and Michelle from behind a wall, to-ing and fro-ing with each other, as if the moments were being eavesdropped. There is something in the lighting, too, the way most of the story is shot in melancholy twilight, that gives it a feeling of in-between. The city of New York feeds into the mood. It becomes a place that offers both expectation and retreat. The film thrums with the ache of broken heart yet shivers with mystery about what’s to come. I suspect it is a film you could really grow to love.
It seems outrageous (and ludicrously unbelievable) that Phoenix has called closing time on his acting career. There are so few actors around who have the gift to signal what lies unspoken and make it sing on a 30ft screen. In Two Lovers, he shows why the movies now really need him.