This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Two Lovers should be a depressing downer of a film, but it’s not. Moody, melancholy and frequently cheerless, the film is not high drama but it’s not trying to be. Drama doesn’t need to reach to great heights to be effective or authentic. And even if we, as viewers, don’t find the characters’ situation to be wrought with mammoth, powerful emotion, it doesn’t mean the sentiment is any less intense for them.

Two Lovers is the story of the curiously charismatic Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), the bipolar son of Israeli immigrants (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) who settled in Brighton Beach (a working-class section of Brooklyn that feels light years from the hipster neighborhoods just across from Manhattan) where they operate a modest dry-cleaning business. Leonard, who has recently returned from what we assume was a stint in a mental institution (he has the scars on his wrists to vouch for a botched suicide attempt), has moved back in with his folks and halfheartedly helps his father run the laundromat.

In an effort to draw their son out, Leonard’s anxious parents introduce him to Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of their business partners. Beautiful, sensible and kind, Sandra is probably just the sort of Jewish girl the peculiarly charming Leonard would be interested in (his parents certainly are) if it weren’t for the fact that he just met Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a WASPy woman who lives upstairs. The blond waif is everything Leonard’s mother fears and everything he wants. The capricious mistress of a rich, married lawyer (Elias Koteas), Michelle is as unstable as Leonard, loathsome of her kept status and addicted to drugs. She sees the young man downstairs as a confidant brother; he sees her as someone he can rescue in lieu of himself.

Two Lovers uses the good girl/bad girl dichotomy as a metaphor for the contradictory demands of filial obligations (Leonard’s father wants him to take over more of the family business) and the natural impulse to make one’s own way in the world (Leonard wants to be a photographer). How does one fulfill the often suffocating duties of a son and still live a life of self-determination and undomesticated freedom? Comfort or exhilaration? How does one make the safe, satisfying choice of Sandra when one has the opportunity to be with the dangerous and unpredictable Michelle? Sometimes we abandon one course in favor of another and discover that we’ve lost them both.

Director James Gray, who is collaborating with Phoenix for the third time, is perhaps best known for the cop drama We Own the Night. Gray, who co-wrote Two Lovers, structures his film like a romantic comedy, complete with all the complications and misunderstandings one would expect, leading not to high jinx but heartbreak. His camera is passionless and non-judgmental, indifferent to either joy or pain. But he shoots mundane, every day life with an epic lens, giving the film a feeling of far greater psychological heft than it might otherwise possess. He crafts voyeuristic scenarios in which characters stare at each other through glass, reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and say things over the phone they cannot say face to face. Emotionally honest, somber and intelligent, the gently-paced Two Lovers is filled with closely observed details, deftly balancing cold, windblown cityscapes with the soaring sounds of opera and the effervescent strains of Henry Mancini.

The bittersweet ending of Two Lovers reminded me tonally of The Graduate. It would be interesting to revisit these characters in five or 10 years time and see what’s become of them. Will they be happy or will we see the self destructive pattern repeating itself? Will these characters learn to love each other and themselves, or will they continue to turn to drugs, indiscreet dalliances and suicide to soothe their tortured souls?

Did you see Phoenix on Letterman recently? Anyone who has wonders if the actor is as unstable and bipolar as the character he plays here. Swearing he has abandoned film for the life of a hip hop artist, the Grizzly Adams-bearded Phoenix has become overpoweringly weird, prone to outrageous attention deficits and incoherent monosyllabic mumblings. Has he really taken a flying leap off the deep end or is it all a piece of very public performance art? If Phoenix is wrestling with drug use or mental illness, the tragedy of losing so fine an actor is eclipsed by far more pressing humanitarian issues. But after watching his vulnerable, calibrated and nuanced performance in Two Lovers, one can’t help but come to the conclusion that an artist this in control of his craft cannot possibly be so unhinged.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.