Movie of the Week: TWO LOVERS (James Gray, 2008)
Happy New Year! Fuck 2023
The case of James Gray is such a strange one: a gifted classicist beloved by Hollywood’s finest actors (probably the reason he gets to keep making expensive dramas that lose money) who’s exponentially more famous in France than he ever will be stateside. While his steady growth in stature has led to an uptick in scale — The Lost City of Z (2016), Ad Astra (2019) — I don’t think he’ll ever top the heights of his 2008 romantic drama Two Lovers. An adaptation of the Dostoyevsky short story “White Nights” (previously given a screen treatment by Luchino Visconti in 1957), Two Lovers follows depressed Brighton Beach manchild Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) as he navigates his attraction to two very different women. Brunette Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) is the Jewish girl that his parents want to set him up with, mostly to shore up a merging of the fathers’ Brooklyn businesses; Blonde Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) is the troubled, mysterious neighbor with whom Leonard falls desperately in love. As Leonard becomes increasingly involved in Michelle’s personal life — she’s having an affair with her boss (Elias Koteas), and wants him to leave his family — he cruelly leads Sandra on while continuing to pursue the other woman. Sandra is soon in love with Leonard, but it’s a genuine love that starkly contrasts Leonard’s perverse obsession with Michelle. What follows is a will-they-won’t-they three-hander bubbling with intrigue and suspense, superlative direction of actors and camera, and a feel for nuance and subtlety that’s all too rare in contemporary American movies. It also features what I believe is one of the great endings: resignation, sadness, and irony come together eerily under one roof, and a particular reverse-shot of Leonard’s mother (Isabella Rossellini) chokes me up every time. Some may look at a movie like Two Lovers and not see much. But I look at it and see something close to perfection.
Streaming on Hulu, Peacock, and the Criterion Channel; available for rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.