Some Drivel On...Two Lovers

In the wake of “Joker” when everyone was rolling out the meme of Joaquin Phoenix’s aspirant standup comic in makeup dancing down those Bronx steps, the art house snobs, of which I am a card-carrying member, rebutted with their own, more infrequent meme, culled from Phoenix’s magnificent “Two Lovers” (2008) in which his character goes out dancing at the club and brings the house down, opening with the robot and leading into the worm. It elicits euphoria out of context but in the context of the movie itself it comes out of nowhere, this young guy, Leonard, living at home with his aged Jewish parents in Brighton Beach, working at his pops’s dry cleaning shop, suffering emotional problems, commandeering the dance floor. It is evocative not only of Leonard’s erratic nature but how Phoenix, in his greatest performance, honors it, truly giving a turn worthy of the familiar acting descriptor of Unpredictable. When Leonard suddenly realizes he’s trailing his neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the woman he takes out dancing, on the sidewalk, Phoenix has Leonard fall into this awkward version of a cock of the walk strut, truly evincing a man following the instantaneous, oft-conflicting signals of brains, the same ones leading him to jump into Sheepshead Bay in a spur-of-the-moment suicide attempt as the film opens before calling it off underwater and kicking back to the surface, literally plunging us into his discombobulated headspace.

This sort of emotional oscillation befits the film’s premise, evoked right there in the movie’s title, “Two Lovers”, the aforementioned Michelle, his neighbor, “who represents,” as the esteemed Roger Ebert wrote, “so many problems she should almost dress by wrapping herself in that yellow tape from crime scene investigations”, and Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) who, much like her father’s yearning to buy Leonard’s father’s dry cleaning store will provide them some security, seeks to provide emotional security for Leonard too. In their scenes together, Shaw really looks at Phoenix, and if he sometimes looks back, he also frequently seems look around her, if not away from her entirely. Paltrow, meanwhile, looks at Leonard like someone who is both listening intently and retaining nothing, a life’s flash, underscoring her character. Indeed, Leonard, in the movie’s looping logic, wants to take care of Michelle as much as Sandra wants to take care of him, an absurd proposition given his mental problems, which are oblique in specifics but prominent nonetheless. For him, Michelle is a fantasy, glimpsed in an excursion to meet her and her (married) male suitor (Elias Koteas) in Manhattan, which director James Gray conveys as a faraway land of enchantment, underscored in Henry Mancini’s accompanying Lujon and shots that seem to be from out a cab window, like a tourist speeding by. Those shots approximate how Leonard and Michelle sometimes converse, through the window.

Their windows, looking at one another across their apartment’s building courtyard, underlines the movie’s acute sense of setting, illustrating how it’s opening a window into a whole other world. That world is contrasted against his parents’ apartment, carefully curated to effuse a warm and lived-in sense, while Leonard’s bedroom is this space in-between, chock full of stuff, as Sandra notes, but also never completely seen in a master shot, allowing us to fill in the blanks with our imagination. In that way, it’s akin to a little boy’s room, brought home in the light cast by the fish tank and the small desk lamp, and denotes the sense of him trying to decide whether to flee out the window, metaphorically speaking, into some adventure or accept the responsibility waiting on the other side of his door.

Yet if Michelle suggests fantastical escape, Gray and his cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay simultaneously question that idea with the colors they choose to shoot the majority of Leonard and Michelle’s scenes, often outdoors and in a blue underlining the wintry chill where even a rooftop love scene feels less romantic than painfully raw. These colors are juxtaposed, then, against the warmer earth tones in scenes of Leonard’s home life and opposite Sandra. At the same, though, emblemizing Leonard’s emotional dilemma, those colors and what they mean begin to run. Though the bar mitzvah of Sandra's little brother is recounted in more comfy hues, it is interrupted by a phone call from Michelle, reaching into his world. Likewise when Leonard has lunch with Sandra later, the table is set against a window, casting them in a frigid light mirroring how his mind remains on Michelle rather than the one he is with.

Unable to keep them apart, the two relationships blur and eventually intersect when Leonard, planning to run away with Michelle, buys an engagement ring. She stands him up, alas, which leads him back to Sandra, putting the ring on her finger instead. And it’s strange. I distinctly remember how melancholy that moment seemed the first I watched it, like a sadistic twist on happy ever after. This time, though, helped along by Shaw’s reaction and Phoenix’s trembling sincerity, I saw it anew, not as an ominous act of settling but a poignant evocation of truly being in love with two people.

The Tears Of Gwyneth

It’s difficult for cinematic seismologists to pinpoint the epicenter of Gwyneth Paltrow becoming one of Hollywood’s Most Hated. Was it when she named her daughter Apple? When she vowed to suffer death before letting young Apple eat cup-a-soup? When she authored a cookbook? When she became a singer? What has been generally agreed upon is that the initial foreshock of Paltrow’s downfall occurred on March 21, 1999, the evening Ms. Paltrow earned a Best Actress Oscar for her work in “Shakespeare In Love” and crumbled into tears. Writing for the UK version of Yahoo Movies Steve Charnock declared: “Gwyneth Paltrow's podium performance in 1999 was so blub-filled you could barely even call it a 'speech'. She emoted more in those two minutes than she has in her entire acting career.” Hey now!

“She emoted more in those two minutes than she has in her entire acting career”? Really? How many of her films has Mr. Charnock seen? “Iron Man” and a little bit of “Shallow Hal” on Comedy Central? This was what Gwyneth’s public tears wrought – they made everyone forget the greatest tears she has ever shed.

Now even in real life Gwyneth cries a lot. How do I know this? I know this because I Googled “Gwyneth Paltrow Cries” and learned she exercises so hard that it makes her cry and that she cries over pancakes and that, well, heck, she herself has said “I cry all the time” and that when Jay Z apparently performed his song “Song Cry” at the Royal Albert Hall several years back he selected Gwyneth to sing the chorus – “I can’t see ‘em comin’ down my eyes so I gotta make the song cry” – because, I mean, who better to make a song cry than her?

Perhaps this real life affinity for waterworks helps her turn them on so regularly and skilfully at the cinema, perhaps not, but whatever the case may be when a movie director needs a few tears on cue who they gonna call? Gwyneth Paltrow. I’m pretty sure she blubbered her entire way through “Hush” and she whimpered in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and she sobbed in “Bounce” and while I can’t recall off the top of my head if she actually wept in “Hard Eight” or “The Royal Tenenbaums”, well, rest assured anyone who has witnessed those roles knows full well she came out of the womb with her mascara already running.

(Almost) best of all, though, is her crying opposite Hollywood’s most notable oddball, Joaquin Phoenix, in the operatic but intimate and wildly under-appreciated “Two Lovers.” There she played the erratic and erratically enchanting Michelle, the sort of woman who, as the late, great Roger Ebert so astutely noted, “represents so many problems she should almost dress by wrapping herself in that yellow tape from crime scene investigations.” Whenever I watch that truly captivating performance (her best ever in my humble estimation) I think of a real life girl on whom I will forever have an unrequited crush (whose name I won’t mention) who once told me how she suffered a public breakdown on a subway. Sigh. ……… Wait, where was I? Oh. Right. Gwyneth Paltrow. “Two Lovers.” She sheds tears and gets the teary sniffles more than once in the film, including in a magnificent rooftop sex scene between she and Phoenix that somehow manages to be erotic, awful and beautiful all at once. Still, though, they are not the most memorable tears in Gwyneth’s canon.

Once upon a time I loved David Fincher’s “Se7en” but confess I have fallen out of love with it in the intervening years. Maybe it’s my age showing but it feels a bit overwrought to be an effective tug of war between good and evil. Paltrow’s character, Tracy Mills, married to Brad Pitt’s police detective David, is little more than a contrivance – existing to cultivate sympathy so her head can wind up in a box. But Paltrow, in only brief flashes, is able to create someone with a very real life spark that has been dimed because of where she is and what she’s doing. Because of her husband’s job she has been cast adrift in a place (New York City) she does not want to be.

She summons Morgan Freeman’s detective – her husband’s partner – to a diner and spills the beans on her pregnancy, which is necessary to set up the grisly end. But the worst part? The worst part is after she makes the confession she makes another confession: “I hate this city.” And then she……crumbles into tears.

Well, those are the finest, most moving, most crushing tears Gwyneth The Crier has publicly shed. I didn’t understand them – not really – when I first saw the movie as a teen and again here and there in my twenties. Now I understand. Now I know the true weight of that weeping, that displacement, that disconnection, that isolation, that……fear. Gwyneth, despite playing a character meant to have reached the dividing line of 30, was but a wee 23 when she played the role and somehow summoned the notion of so many emotions I can only imagine she did not yet understand or had not yet even felt.

Can the version of Gwyneth the public sees get on my nerves? Sure. I’m reasonably certain if I ever attended Baconfest Gwyneth would be at the gates with a megaphone and group of picket sign-wielding dissidents screaming at me like a vegan-styled Fred Phelps. But even so, Most Hated, Most Beautiful, whatever, the tears of Gwyneth Paltrow on the silver screen are a gift. Let's make sure to treasure each one.