In Deepest Brooklyn, Affairs of the Heart

By A. O. SCOTT
“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. But this movie, the director James Gray’s fourth feature (after “Little Odessa,” “The Yards” and “We Own the Night”), 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.
The story Mr. Gray has to tell (he wrote the screenplay with Richard Menello) is modest in scale, but the feelings that run through it are large and intense. And why shouldn’t they be? The life of Leonard Kraditor might seem ordinary, even drab — he lives with his parents, works for his father’s dry-cleaning business, dabbles in photography — but his desires and sorrows, his fundamental confusion about who he should be, certainly don’t feel trivial to him. Hardly a feckless youth, Leonard is in his early 30s, with a breakup and a breakdown (involving a suicide attempt) just behind him. Played with twitchy sensitivity by Joaquin Phoenix, Leonard is by turns raw and benumbed, at once comforted and smothered by the homey claustrophobia of life with his tactful old-world dad (Moni Moshonov) and his hovering, anxious mother (Isabella Rossellini).



Though it is set in the present, “Two Lovers” takes place in what often feels like an earlier incarnation of New York, a world of lower-middle-class neighborhoods and workaday aspirations that is still very real but that seems less interesting to ambitious filmmakers and writers than it used to be. Leonard’s literary and cinematic kinsmen are guys like Ernest Borgnine’s lonely Bronx butcher in “Marty” and the libidinous, insecure strivers who populate the early fiction of Philip Roth.


Like a Roth hero — and just about every other American Jewish male protagonist from Augie March to Jerry Seinfeld — he struggles with the conflicting demands of filial duty and the longing to strike out on his own. He wants to be a good son, but he also wants to live a life of danger, freedom and impulse. Does he stick with his own kind and risk suffocation, or does he risk rootlessness in pursuit of liberation?



These choices are hardly abstract. They are embodied by two women who contend for Leonard’s attention and affection and who also, to some extent, conform to the ancient archetypes identified by the literary critic Leslie Fiedler of the Good Good Girl and the Good Bad Girl. Vinessa Shaw plays Sandra, the girl Leonard might have brought home to mother if mother hadn’t brought her home first. She’s the daughter of an important business associate of Leonard’s father, and if she and Leonard paired off, there would be advantages all around. Luckily for Leonard, Sandra is also kind, smart, patient and very sexy.


But he can’t help but be distracted by Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a willowy blonde who turns up, to Leonard’s amazement and his mother’s undisguised horror, in their apartment building. Michelle is an exotic transplant in the outer-borough soil, filling Leonard’s nose with the Manhattany perfume of sophistication and sexual adventure. She is also needy, capricious and a little unstable, which allows Leonard’s fantasy of escape to be twinned with a dream of rescue. Michelle is the mistress of a rich, married lawyer (Elias Koteas), and she turns to Leonard as a brotherly confidant even as her vulnerability seems to offer the chance for something more.



Structurally “Two Lovers” is a romantic comedy, with complications and misunderstandings accelerating toward a big decision. But while there are moments of humor — and a sublimely witty, almost surreal performance from Ms. Rossellini — the overall mood is earnest and anguished. The picture’s basic conflict is one Mr. Gray has explored before: the tension between the individual spirit and the ways of the tribe. But previously the tribalism has been that of gangsters or cops, and has been worked out through the violent rituals of the urban crime genre, where sentimentality grows out of the barrel of a gun.


It can be argued that with “Two Lovers” Mr. Gray has traded in one set of clichés for another. But perhaps because the conventions of romantic melodrama have lain dormant for so long, there is something fresh and vivid about the way he uses them here. He is also a generous and sympathetic director of actors, and he makes the most of Ms. Shaw’s grace, Ms. Paltrow’s unpredictability and Mr. Phoenix’s odd, intriguing blend of solemnity and mischief. Their performances go a long way toward preventing the movie from becoming overwrought or schematic.



It’s a little of both, to tell the truth. But the flaws in “Two Lovers” are inseparable from its strengths. You could, I suppose, criticize the movie for being too sincere; too generous to its imperfect, self-deluded characters; too absorbed in their small crises and disproportionate reactions. But that criticism might sound a lot like praise.


“Two Lovers” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for language, some sexuality and brief drug use.



TWO LOVERS


Opens on Friday nationwide.



Directed by James Gray; written by Mr. Gray and Richard Menello; director of photography, Joaquin Baca-Asay; edited by John Axelrad; production designer, Happy Massee; produced by Mr. Gray, Anthony Katagas and Donna Gigliotti; released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.


WITH: Joaquin Phoenix (Leonard Kraditor), Gwyneth Paltrow (Michelle Rausch), Vinessa Shaw (Sandra Cohen), Moni Moshonov (Reuben Kraditor), Isabella Rossellini (Ruth Kraditor) and Elias Koteas (Ronald Blatt).

source : The new york times