REVIEW: Smart, honest 'Two Lovers' isn't high-brow

"Two Lovers" should be a depressing downer of a film, but it's not.

Moody, melancholy and frequently cheerless, the film is not high drama but it's not trying to be. Drama doesn't need to reach to great heights to be effective or authentic.

And even if we, as viewers, don't find the characters' situation to be wrought with mammoth, powerful emotion, it doesn't mean the sentiment is any less intense for them.

"Two Lovers" is the story of the curiously charismatic Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), the bipolar son of Israeli immigrants (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) who settled in Brighton Beach, a working-class section of Brooklyn, where they operate a modest dry-cleaning business. Leonard, who has recently returned from what we assume was a stint in a mental institution (he has the scars on his wrists to vouch for a botched suicide attempt), has moved back in with his folks and halfheartedly helps his father run the laundromat.

In an effort to draw their son out, Leonard's anxious parents introduce him to Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of their business partners. Beautiful, sensible and kind, Sandra is probably just the sort of Jewish girl the peculiarly charming Leonard would be interested in (his parents certainly are) if it weren't for the fact that he just met Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a WASPy woman who lives upstairs.

The blond waif is everything Leonard's mother fears and everything he wants. The capricious mistress of a rich, married lawyer (Elias Koteas), Michelle is as unstable as Leonard, loathsome of her kept status and addicted to drugs.

She sees the young man downstairs as a confidant brother; he sees her as someone he can rescue in lieu of himself.

"Two Lovers" uses the good girl/bad girl dichotomy as a metaphor for the contradictory demands of filial obligations (Leonard's father wants him to take over more of the family business) and the natural impulse to make one's own way in the world (Leonard wants to be a photographer).

How does one fulfill the often suffocating duties of a son and still live a life of self-determination and undomesticated freedom? How does one make the safe, satisfying choice of Sandra when one has the opportunity to be with the dangerous and unpredictable Michelle? Sometimes we abandon one course in favor of another and discover that we've lost them both.

Director James Gray, who is collaborating with Phoenix for the third time, is perhaps best known for the cop drama "We Own the Night." Gray, who co-wrote "Two Lovers," structures his film like a romantic comedy, complete with all the complications and misunderstandings one would expect, leading not to high jinks but heartbreak.

His camera is passionless and non-judgmental, indifferent to either joy or pain. But he shoots mundane life with an epic lens, giving the film a feeling of far greater psychological heft than it might otherwise possess. He crafts voyeuristic scenarios in which characters stare at each other through glass, reminiscent of Hitchcock's "Rear Window," and say the things over the phone they cannot say face to face.

Emotionally honest, somber and intelligent, the gently-paced "Two Lovers" is filled with closely observed details, deftly balancing cold, windblown cityscapes with the soaring sounds of opera and the effervescent strains of Henry Mancini.

TWO LOVERS

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Isabella Rossellini
Director: James Gray
Theater: Kimball's
Rating: R (for language, some sexuality and brief drug use)
Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

GRADE: B+