Two Lovers is a Christmas-on-the-horizon-set; New York City based romance of sorts, starring the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and a prominent supporting female of the toothy, perky variety whose dopey sounding admittal to what her favourite film is sees her cite The Sound of Music because ".....it's always on the television when I watch it and do so with my family". In spite of this, try not to let these facts cloud immediate judgement; there is a biting, unnerving film somewhere in Two Lovers desperately trying to get out; a bleak and rather devilish study of a man forced into confronting fears and past tragedies attempting to force its way to the forefront. It is a film at once overly bubbly and rather routine on occasion; but with that, and at the best of times, a shrill and cinematic characterisation of a man we sense might tilt over a proverbial edge and into either a desperate realm of anti-socialism or a deeply rooted state of hatred and misogyny born out of what previously happened to him. The film is at its best when the director, James Gray, is drawing on inspiration from Mary Haron's American Psycho, and having his lead waltzing through the lamp-lit night streets of New York to Henry Mancini's "Lujon" - strolling to a luxurious restaurant to meet someone in spite of both his feelings towards, and her's towards other men, remaining what they are - the rest of the film mostly fills in for everything else, and it's then our attention wanes.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard, a New Yorker in his early thirties living with his parents in an apartment a stone's throw from the family's laundry service business at which he works, a fitting industry, because our Leonard has some serious psychological stains of his own to cleanse. The man is suicidal; he ventures home drenched, squelching through the house having just failed in his latest attempt: a leaping into local bay which resulted in a bystander jumping in and saving him to very little thanks. His parents are unobtrusive; desiring him to be as comfortable as he can be and giving him breathing room, his bedroom chock-full of varying posters of whatever and general clutter amidst an aquarium, a private space overlooking the apartment complex's courtyard. The man's reason for occupying the psychological squalor in which he is presently in is due to his former fiancée having left him when it became apparent, through tests, that neither of them would be able to have children whom could live beyond a certain young age.
The film branches out into Leonard's confronting of one's past problems, principally the moving on and the inducing of a fresh relationship; the aforementioned teeth-and-perk-driven character Sandra, played by Vinessa Shaw, the first to arrive by way of a quaint family dinner with some of Leonard's parents' friends. Briefly, Sandra and Leonard bond in his bedroom, their communication eventually broken up by calls through from the meal room upon the serving of desert, calls that instill a certain child-like characteristic into both parties as if they were kids called to a meal-table by one's parents and inferring either party are on a respective level. With Sandra comes Michelle, a woman entering Leonard's life by virtue of being a new neighbour in the complex; a woman whom enjoys a relatively high-life of night clubs and the presence of masses of friends at once once out, but a character we have a hard time entrusting with Gwyneth Paltrow when someone such as Maria Bello may have carried it a bit better.
The film toys with either of these women entering and leaving and then entering Leonard's life again and again; Gray doing an admirable job in executing what he sets out to do, but not doing enough to have the nihilists inside of us eventually question the necessity for the character of Sandra in the text, as we cover this man and his predominant tie with Michelle to whom he is persistently strained to form a concrete bond with. The chief problem lies with Leonard's behaviour. At once quiet and likable; fragile, delicate and, we feel, vulnerable to the presence of the wrong individual in his life at this tough time, the man is another entity entirely once plunged into a different arena, when he takes on a foul mouthed, supremely confident individual capable to showing off his skills in rapping (surely a prelude to the following year's I'm Still Here) and dancing skills to a bevvy of women forcing us into reevaluating if we missed a trick during earlier sequences.
On occasion, and at the most piercing and most engaging of times, the film feels like a depiction of a sickly unbalanced man occupying his surroundings we're unaware of how far he is away from proverbially cracking: Gray's utilisation of the extreme close up of his lead's eye, as he spies Michelle across the courtyard from the darkness of his bedroom whilst lying to her on the phone, a composition immediately calling to mind that of Bates' spying on Marion Crane through the spyhole in Psycho. When we watch Leonard listen to operatic music, with half of his face drenched in shadow and the other in white light, all the while gazing off into the rest of the room, we sense that something bleaker; something more sinister; something more adult lurks within the text that just isn't allowed out to play. Gray often shoots the night-set streets of New York as this dangerously alluring locale rife with wealth and affluence, but with a menacing undercurrent lurking beneath in sync with his lead – it is a world away from the bustling; terror-aware daytime rush. Alas, the film is more inclined towards offbeat conversations between its lead and his would-be girlfriends; a film with a biting sense of anger combining with grief resonating beneath the surface, but a film more often than not annoyingly played safe.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard, a New Yorker in his early thirties living with his parents in an apartment a stone's throw from the family's laundry service business at which he works, a fitting industry, because our Leonard has some serious psychological stains of his own to cleanse. The man is suicidal; he ventures home drenched, squelching through the house having just failed in his latest attempt: a leaping into local bay which resulted in a bystander jumping in and saving him to very little thanks. His parents are unobtrusive; desiring him to be as comfortable as he can be and giving him breathing room, his bedroom chock-full of varying posters of whatever and general clutter amidst an aquarium, a private space overlooking the apartment complex's courtyard. The man's reason for occupying the psychological squalor in which he is presently in is due to his former fiancée having left him when it became apparent, through tests, that neither of them would be able to have children whom could live beyond a certain young age.
The film branches out into Leonard's confronting of one's past problems, principally the moving on and the inducing of a fresh relationship; the aforementioned teeth-and-perk-driven character Sandra, played by Vinessa Shaw, the first to arrive by way of a quaint family dinner with some of Leonard's parents' friends. Briefly, Sandra and Leonard bond in his bedroom, their communication eventually broken up by calls through from the meal room upon the serving of desert, calls that instill a certain child-like characteristic into both parties as if they were kids called to a meal-table by one's parents and inferring either party are on a respective level. With Sandra comes Michelle, a woman entering Leonard's life by virtue of being a new neighbour in the complex; a woman whom enjoys a relatively high-life of night clubs and the presence of masses of friends at once once out, but a character we have a hard time entrusting with Gwyneth Paltrow when someone such as Maria Bello may have carried it a bit better.
The film toys with either of these women entering and leaving and then entering Leonard's life again and again; Gray doing an admirable job in executing what he sets out to do, but not doing enough to have the nihilists inside of us eventually question the necessity for the character of Sandra in the text, as we cover this man and his predominant tie with Michelle to whom he is persistently strained to form a concrete bond with. The chief problem lies with Leonard's behaviour. At once quiet and likable; fragile, delicate and, we feel, vulnerable to the presence of the wrong individual in his life at this tough time, the man is another entity entirely once plunged into a different arena, when he takes on a foul mouthed, supremely confident individual capable to showing off his skills in rapping (surely a prelude to the following year's I'm Still Here) and dancing skills to a bevvy of women forcing us into reevaluating if we missed a trick during earlier sequences.
On occasion, and at the most piercing and most engaging of times, the film feels like a depiction of a sickly unbalanced man occupying his surroundings we're unaware of how far he is away from proverbially cracking: Gray's utilisation of the extreme close up of his lead's eye, as he spies Michelle across the courtyard from the darkness of his bedroom whilst lying to her on the phone, a composition immediately calling to mind that of Bates' spying on Marion Crane through the spyhole in Psycho. When we watch Leonard listen to operatic music, with half of his face drenched in shadow and the other in white light, all the while gazing off into the rest of the room, we sense that something bleaker; something more sinister; something more adult lurks within the text that just isn't allowed out to play. Gray often shoots the night-set streets of New York as this dangerously alluring locale rife with wealth and affluence, but with a menacing undercurrent lurking beneath in sync with his lead – it is a world away from the bustling; terror-aware daytime rush. Alas, the film is more inclined towards offbeat conversations between its lead and his would-be girlfriends; a film with a biting sense of anger combining with grief resonating beneath the surface, but a film more often than not annoyingly played safe.