"Two Lovers"

By David Hudson on 02/12/2009

"If there are, as Steven Soderbergh is fond of saying, three types of filmmakers - those who don't know what they're doing, those who know what they're doing and you like what they're doing, and those who know what they're doing but you don't like what they're doing - then until recently, I would have placed James Gray squarely in the third category." LA Weekly's Scott Foundas explains how Gray's won him over: "Loosely adapted from Dostoevsky's short story 'White Nights,' 'Two Lovers' is an unexpectedly delicate romantic drama that charts the gradually deepening affection of two damaged people: Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix again), a depressive young man recovering from a suicide attempt, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the beautiful legal secretary who moves into Leonard's Brighton Beach apartment building."

He also interviews Gray, as do Stuart Klawans (Nextbook) and Elisabeth Donnelly (TribecaFilm).

"'Two Lovers,' which had an ecstatic world premiere in Cannes last May, is something of a departure for the 39-year-old director - a switch from the posturing gangsta grit of 'Little Odessa,' 'The Yards' and 'We Own the Night' to wacky romantic drama." J Hoberman in the Voice: "Still constant, however, are the suffocating family atmosphere and tone-deaf repartee."

Updated through 2/16.

"You might describe Gray's career as a long and lonely campaign to revive the tradition of old-fashioned storytelling in American cinema," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Although this film is set in the 21st century and has the cell phones and hip-hop music to prove it, Gray's portrait of Jewish middle-class life in Brooklyn has a timeless, recurring-dream quality, both in ways he intends and (I suspect) in ways beyond his conscious control."

It's "a movie of contradictions," writes Elbert Ventura at indieWIRE: "genuine yet implausible, modest yet grandiose, familiar yet utterly singular."

"'Two Lovers' is so rich that at first I dismissed its title as the film's one mistake, an unimaginatively obvious story pitch," admits Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "And yet, like the whole of James Gray's masterpiece, it's deceptively simple and strangely ambiguous."

"If the ending feels a bit rushed, it nevertheless ambiguously caps another unusually subterranean movie from an extremely distinctive director," writes Dan Callahan in Slant.

"It's a testament to the childish madness of infatuation, and maybe even true love's impossibility. Happy Valentines!" Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

"Love is exhilarating, maddening and cruel in 'Two Lovers,'" writes Nick Schager in Screengrab, "and tragedy, if one might call it that, comes not just from painful loss, but from being forced to compromise, to settle for more than one could have hoped for and yet less than one momentarily dared to dream."

More from Tony Dayoub, Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), David Edelstein (New York), Eugene Novikov (Cinematical), Mark Peikert (New York Press), Joshua Rothkopf (Time Out New York), Andrew Sarris (New York Observer) and James Van Maanen.

In the Los Angeles Times, John Horn considers Joaquin Phoenix's career whiplash and Michael Ordoña meets Vinessa Shaw.

Online listening tip. IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss Phoenix's career.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 2/14: "James Gray has exactly what American cinema needs - sincerity." Daniel Kasman: "Gray deals in melodrama - and male melodrama at that - but treats it with a solemn seriousness that makes one believe again in the earnestness of American genre cinema."

Also in the Auteurs' Notebook, David Phelps: "At Cannes, Americans panned the film because the dialogue's bad: true if you take it at face value; which is like taking Albert Brooks's dialogue at face value.... But the point of the dialogue throughout is its inadequacy to express anything; Gray is an actor's director - he is in their service, and lights in flesh tones - so the real expressions are all facial. As in the old melodramas, but also as in real life, Gray's actors speak in grins, down-turned eyes, and the blind, drunken groping of people sick of being themselves."

"For all its super-sized emotions and Greek-tragic aspirations, [Gray's] is a body of work rendered with straight-faced, almost dogmatic sincerity, one that envisions itself as a corrective to the hipper-than-thou irony pervading much of recent American cinema," writes Andrew Chan in Reverse Shot. "While watching a Gray movie, our powers of empathy are meant to be in full gear, and our cynicism momentarily suspended--a melodramatic imperative that has encountered its fair share of resistance from critics and audiences."

"'Two Lovers' deals with the romantic ambivalence of a young man in Brooklyn, a description that might set visions of mumblecore dancing in your head," suggests AO Scott in the New York Times. "But this movie... is not another low-key, closely observed study in bohemian diffidence. It takes place in Brighton Beach, many subway stops (and sociological light years) from the northwestern sections of the borough, where the hipsters roam. And its palette of emotions, like its rich and somber 35-millimeter cinematography, departs from the hand-held, hi-def, discursive style associated with directors like Joe Swanberg and Aaron Katz, harking back to an older, artistically more conservative film tradition of lush, earnest melodrama."

"Just try to forget for a moment that star Joaquin Phoenix is quickly becoming an eccentric performance artist of the Andy Kaufman variety in real life," advises Aaron Hillis at GreenCine Daily, "and cherish what he claims will be his last film: a fantastic, sumptuously lit and shot melodrama of overlapping, shaky love triangles that is mature like nothing else yet on screens this year."

"I am head over heels in love with this movie!" exclaims Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail.

More from Chris Barsanti (PopMatters), Peter Martin (Twitch) and Keith Phipps (AV Club).

Steve Erickson talks with Gray for the SpoutBlog, Phil Nugent for Screengrab. Another interview: indieWIRE.

Update, 2/16: "However moody... 'Two Lovers' didn't strike me as a downer, for the simple reason that it wells with sights and sounds that are guaranteed to lift, not sink, the spirits," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

Tags: Gwyneth Paltrow, James Gray, Joaquin Phoenix, Two Lovers