Joaquin!? Why did you do it? Why give up acting to become a beardy rapper? Why, why, why?
As you’ll recall, Joaquin Phoenix announced last year that he was quitting the film business in favour of a new career in hip-hop. If he sticks to his guns – and there are those who suggest the whole business is an elaborate prank – then his last screen role will have been in director James Gray’s romantic melodrama Two Lovers.
He gives a typically intense performance in Gray’s movie as the troubled Leonard, a young man who finds himself torn between two women in the painful aftermath of splitting up with his fiancée. His anxious mum and dad try to set him up with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the sympathetic daughter of a family friend, but Leonard can’t stop himself falling for new neighbour Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) the beautiful but unstable woman who’s just taken the apartment upstairs from his parents’ home in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
Best known until now for his Brooklyn-set crime movies Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night, Gray has made a thoughtful and sensitive chamber piece, and he gets a fine performance from Phoenix, who conveys his character’s anguish and heartache with deep feeling. But the movie is seriously hampered by its casting – Paltrow’s Michelle is supposed to be damaged yet irresistible, but how on earth Leonard could possibly prefer her irritating neurotic over Shaw’s gorgeous, grounded Sandra is as big a mystery as Phoenix’s career switch. Please Joaquin, as Two Lovers proves, it’s cinema’s loss, not music’s gain.
Two Lovers is released on DVD by Lionsgate and is currently showing on FilmFlex until 9th December.
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I think this film’s casting is spot-on personally. Surely the question of how Leonard could prefer “irritating neurotic” Michelle over the grounded (and Jewish) Sandra, is the whole point of the story, isn’t it?
Leonard is a depressed newly single Jewish man who’s been forced to move back in with his parents and is therefore subjected to their well-meaning, but extremely controlling, influence. His Jewish identity (which you haven’t mentioned) is key to this as it defines him at a time when he clearly needs to explore and define himself. His pursuit of the non-Jewish neurotic Michelle is therefore his way of exploring his own neurosis.
True, damaged people often seek out other damaged people as soul mates. But I still feel that for the film to work fully the viewer – and not just Leonard – needs to feel torn between Michelle and Sandra. We too need to feel drawn to Paltrow’s Michelle, to be at least partly seduced by her dangerous glamour, and I felt we didn’t get that from her character: simply put, Michelle was more irritating than charismatic.
As for the Jewishness of the characters, yes, the fact that Michelle is a blonde shiksa is part of her attraction for Leonard, but Gray blurs this by casting the Jewish Paltrow in the role.