Two Lovers

Synopsis: Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) is a troubled man who has returned home to his parents after a failed suicide attempt following a broken romance. His parents, who run a dry-cleaning business, set him up with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), daughter of another dry-cleaner with whose company they are planning a merger, in the hope that he will marry her. But Leonard meets Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a mixed-up blonde bombshell with whom he becomes smitten.

I kept wondering throughout this film just how old these characters were supposed to be. With both Phoenix and Paltrow being in their mid-thirties they sure carried on in an almost adolescent fashion, but hey, aren’t mid-thirties the new adolescents these days?

This nit-picking criticism aside, Two Lovers is a compelling story of mental illness, love and obsession, and will be scarily close to the bone for people who always seem to make the wrong choices in life, picking the obviously toxic relationship over the positive one.

I’m a big fan of Phoenix and he doesn’t disappoint in this role. In the powerful opening scene, which focuses intriguingly on Leonard’s back, we see him leap from a bridge into the water, and after being rescued, head wearily home to his loving mother (Isabella Rossellini) and father (Moni Monoshov). We learn that Leonard has bi-polar disorder and has forgotten his medication. Phoenix pays careful attention to detail in his portrayal, with small but significant gestures, which paint a picture of a disturbed yet appealing man who is somehow childlike and adult at the same time. After he meets Michelle, and goes to a disco with her he almost transforms to a different person – we get a glimpse of the man he must have been before the sorrow of life got too much for him.

Paltrow handles the role of the destructive pill-popping Michelle competently – perhaps I’ve just never really enjoyed her as an actress and can’t see what Leonard sees in her but it is to the credit of director Gray who co-wrote the script, that somehow we come to understand what it is that attracts Leonard. Michelle’s vibrancy and her seeming ability to really get into life, compared to the steady, unassuming (perhaps boring?) character of Sandra is a fatal lure that many people would recognise.

Set in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, the film is fairly typically New York, and although the dry-cleaners are all Jewish, fortunately there is no stereotyping. The real impression is that of love and support, in a family sense. By contrast, Michelle, who tells Leonard she sees him as a brother after only two weeks of knowing him, seems ultimately oblivious to the true meaning of love.

Though touted as a romantic drama there is something refreshingly different about this film. It refuses to follow the formula, doesn’t rely on cheesy situations, and if not earth-shattering, is a well written and well-acted portrait of love’s pitfalls that will be instantly recognisable to many.

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