By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: James Gray
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow | Joaquin Phoenix | Vinessa Shaw
Country: united_states
Year: 2009
Running time: 110
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1103275/
Peg says: “This odd, often bleak little film starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow stumbles as it starts but eventually settles into an absorbing character driven drama. Not quite a love story, this is more a narrative of surviving a break up. Directed by James Gray and set in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, it’s the story of Leonard Kraditor, a depressed young man living with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov). The film opens with Leonard jumping off a bridge into a river, claiming to have fallen. It’s apparently not his first suicide attempt. Leonard was engaged to be married but the discovery that he and his fiance both carried the gene for a deadly birth defect destroyed their plans.
“Leonard’s parents orchestrate a meeting with Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw), a family friend, and they fall into a relationship. Shortly after their first date he meets Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a neighbor who invites Leonard out clubbing. Though she flirts with him, she’s clearly only looking for a friend of the doormat variety, and her troubled relationship with a married Wall Street exec drives Leonard crazy. He carries on seeing both women, deceiving and deceived.
“The setting and milieu of this film is very specific: Jewish families who work in traditional businesses (dry cleaning) in urban apartments furnished with old-fashioned accoutrements. But Jewish identity is never a plot point, only an atmospheric cornerstone. Grouding the story in one family’s drab yet comforting physical reality lends an appropriate timelessness to the story, and punctuates glimpses of what can only be called ‘old New York’, told with music and glimpses of the mercurial city that changes with every day.
“For its performances and its very balanced, authentic portrayal of setting and character, I give this film 3 cats.”
Jay says: “TWO LOVERS is the sort of movie that can drive a single man batty. After all, the vast majority are not mentally ill mumblers who live with our parents, and yet it takes us a great deal of effort to find ourselves involved with even one girl who looks like Vinesssa Shaw or Gwyneth Paltrow. Two in the same day, more or less because of messing things up enough to have had to move back in with the ‘rents? An insult to non-screw-ups everywhere!
“Granted, Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) isn’t entirely to blame; his engagement fell apart when he and his fiancée found out they both carried a recessive gene, and any children they had would be unlikely to live a year. He’s getting better; his suicide attempt at the start of the movie isn’t nearly as heartfelt as the one which landed him in a psychiatric hospital. Now, aging parents Reuben (Moni Moshonov) and Ruth (Isabella Rossellini) are planning to sell their dry-cleaning business to Michael Cohen (Bob Ari), as well as set him up with Cohen’s daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw). Of course, before Leonard can meet Sandra, he runs into a new neighbor, Michelle Rausch (Gwyneth Paltrow), the beautiful but occasionally unstable mistress of Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas).
“It’s not even necessary to meet Sandra to see the roles that everyone is going to play: Michelle is the alluring choice filled with uncertainty; Sandra the traditional one who has just about zero wrong with her but does not particularly excite Leonard (a female Baxter, if you remember that movie). Leonard’s parents are well-meaning but, like all Jewish movie parents, a little too involved. Blatt is the man who doesn’t marry the girl whom the man doesn’t marry. Leonard has a passion outside the dry-cleaning business to make him look like more than meets the eye, in this case photography.
“The three-body gravitational problem may remain intractable in real life, but in the movies, you can predict their paths of this group with uncanny precision. Maybe not from the very beginning, but what will happen in the next fifteen or twenty minutes is generally what a person would expect from having seen other movies and recognizing that Two Lovers is not a romantic comedy. Neither the Brighton Beach setting nor any of the characters are sufficiently unique to send the story in unexpected directions.
“Worse than that, they’re not interesting enough to make watching them go through the motions particularly worthwhile. Leonard’s story is sad, sure, but Phoenix plays him as a mere lump of wallowing misery, mumbling and self-effacing enough to keep the audience from having much connection with him at all. He’s at least got a personality, though; Vinessa Shaw is given close to nothing to work with. We know that Sandra is attracted to Leonard from how she saw him in a good moment once, and that she’s self-aware enough to recognize that she could choose from a large pool of men, because she tells us, but she’s otherwise a blank. Shaw makes her pleasant enough, sympathetic as the only honest and forthright person in the triangle, and hints that she has a life exterior to the movie, which is probably all that can be expected of her. Michelle is less brainy than Paltrow’s usual characters, but she’s still predictably fragile. It’s a well-honed performance, but one we’ve seen before.
“All three are fairly passive characters, and maybe that’s the point: Like in the three-body gravitational problem, it may not be possible to calculate exactly how they’ll attract each other and perturb their respective paths, but they’re still affected by the rules of nature. The same circumstances will give the same results barring an outside force, and this movie’s got no outside forces to supply. Director James Gray keeps things moving smoothly enough – the movie doesn’t succumb to dead spots, and even the odd moment when Leonard is suddenly charming enough to give us some idea what Sandra would see in him doesn’t seem completely out of place. He and co-writer do fall victim to thinking some of their details are more interesting than they actually are, especially by falling into the trap of substituting interest in opera and photography for personality.
“Of course, you could say the same about introducing physics into a simple movie review. That still doesn’t change the fact that TWO LOVERS is a thoroughly Newtonian movie, following set, predictable paths, when it really could use an unpredictable quantum jolt. 2 cats”
Diane says: “I know this doesn’t quite count as a valid review, but I just had to stop watching TWO LOVERS after half an hour because the script was so bad.”