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| Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow in Two Lovers |
A Jewish man who lives with his parents falls in love with a pretty blonde shiksa, despite his parents' urging him to marry the nice Jewish girl whose parents are involved in a business deal with them. Seen this one, have you? Was it an early Woody Allen movie? Or the one with Richard Benjamin and Cybill Shepherd? It was a comedy, right? With lots of ethnic jokes and some cringey scenes? No, it's a James Gray movie set in Brighton Beach. Oh, then the son is a hitman and the business deal is a shady one involving the mob? And it's bleak and unforgiving in both mood and setting? Sorry, no. It's a tender, romantic film, perhaps still a little bleak, about some damaged people who nevertheless find a resolution to their problems. Two Lovers marked a remarkable turn in Gray's filmography, not so much away from the melancholy New York streets of his first films as toward a perception that there's another side to the lives led there. Gray knows the clichés and stereotypes that his plot evokes and deftly avoids them. There's even a bar mitzvah scene that in other hands would have been fertile ground for ethnic stereotyping but just skirts it. It helps that he has actors who know how to avoid the clichés, too. Gwyneth Paltrow, who is sometimes mocked for epitomizing an aloof upper-middle-class image, finds the poignancy in her role as the kept woman of a married hotshot lawyer (Elias Koteas). Isabella Rossellini completely ignores the Jewish mother stereotype while managing somehow to remind us of it. Vinessa Shaw is terrific as the nice Jewish girl who may hear the ticking of her biological clock but doesn't show that she feels pressured by it. But mostly it's Joaquin Phoenix's film as Leonard Kraditor, a man in early middle life who has never found a place in life that wasn't prepared for him by someone else. He opens the film with what may be a suicide attempt -- he's tried it before -- from which he decides to rescue himself. He's had a breakdown before and is on medication, and he's something of a screwup in his work for his father's dry cleaning business, but he realizes that he's still loved by his somewhat bewildered parents. When he gets involved in a relationship with Paltrow's Michelle, a head case and a druggie, we fear for the worst -- which almost happens. But then it doesn't, and in a scene that might have been sentimental, except that it was created by Gray and Phoenix, one of the best director-actor relationships in film, things turn out at least provisionally okay. And we recognize that sometimes that's just the way life is.
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