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List Price: $29.98 | | Label: Magnolia Home Entertainment
Salesrank: 11225
Released: June 30, 2009 |
| Our Price: $9.98 |
| Used Price: $1.77 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Set in the insular world of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, TWO LOVERS is a classic romantic drama, with Joaquin Phoenix giving a raw and vulnerable performance as Leonard, a charismatic but troubled young man who moves back into his childhood home following a recent heartbreak. While recovering under the watchful eye of his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov), Leonard meets two women in quick succession: Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a mysterious and beautiful neighbor who is exotic and out-of-place in Leonard's staid world, and Sandra, the lovely and caring daughter of a businessman who is buying out his family's dry-cleaning business.
Leonard becomes deeply infatuated by Michelle, who seems poised to fall for him, but is having a self-destructive affair with a married man. At the same time, mounting pressure from his family pushes him towards committing to Sandra. Leonard is forced to make an impossible decision between the impetuousness of desire and the comfort of love or risk falling back into the darkness that nearly killed him.
Description of Two Lovers:
Russian-American director James Gray (The Yards) has never made any secret of his affection for the Italian crime drama. That operatic influence permeated his first three features, but Two Lovers takes more cues from intimate French films and angst-ridden Russian fiction (specifically Dostoevsky's short story "White Nights"). Aspiring photographer Leonard (Gray regular Joaquin Phoenix) returns to Brooklyn after a failed relationship only to find himself torn between two paramours of opposing personalities. Sandra (Vinessa Shaw, 3:10 to Yuma) represents the safe choice, while Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow, recalling her streetwise character in P.T. Anderson's Hard Eight) presents more of a challenge--she's a party girl in love with a married man--but Michelle excites him in ways the thoughtful and attentive Sandra, a drug-company rep, does not. Gray leaves it up to viewers to determine whether Leonard should factor religion into his decision; his supportive parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov) would love to see him pair up with the Jewish Sandra, but mostly they want their only son to be happy. If he joins his father--and Sandra's--in the dry-cleaning game, that would be a happy bonus (the men are working on a merger). Though Leonard's bipolar quirks threaten to derail the proceedings--it's hard to believe two beautiful women would gravitate towards such a socially awkward fellow--Two Lovers marks an improvement over Gray's previous movie, We Own the Night, and a welcome return to the picturesque Brighton Beach neighborhood of Little Odessa, his auspicious debut. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Two Lovers Reviews:
Every other 5-star review said it for me... 
2009-10-26 - ... but I would just like to emphasize one thing - brilliantly, achingly, phenomenally, flawlessly acted. I cannot stress how much I was reeled into this movie. Paltrow and Phoenix really deliver. I strongly, strongly urge you to see this film. The end credits just rolled and I'm left wishing it weren't over.
haunting look into the human heart 
2009-10-12 - It's a tricky enough business trying to juggle two relationships at the same time even under the best of circumstances. Now imagine trying to do so when your mental stability is already in question and your emotional state far from sound.
In "Two Lovers," Joaquin Phoenix plays a young man who suffers from suicidal depression. His condition has made it imperative that he move back in with his parents, an old world couple who live in a spacious apartment in Brighton Beach. Leonard's life turns even more complicated and stressful when he becomes involved with both an attractive friend of the family (whom the parents want him to hook up with) and a beautiful but seriously troubled neighbor he meets one day in the hall. The problem is that Leonard is really head-over-heels in love with the needy, self-absorbed and high maintenance Michelle (who is herself involved with a married man), and is really only using Sandra as a means of getting back at Michelle for not reciprocating his love.
Based on the Dostoevsky short story "White Nights" and the 1957 Visconti movie of the same name, the inexorably sad and moving "Two Lovers" takes place in a world in which the characters rarely talk above a whisper and from which all possibility of joy seems to have been drained away. The movie is almost achingly perceptive about how the human psyche actually works when it comes to affairs of the heart, acknowledging that we can control neither how we feel about others nor how others feel about us - though we certainly do expend a great deal of our energy and time trying! Leonard is not a "bad" guy at heart; he doesn't go out of his way to intentionally hurt others, but he's also not above deceiving himself into believing he's doing nothing wrong when he clearly is. Ditto for Michelle who's too focused on herself and her own needs and desires to much care how her actions are affecting others. And poor, trusting Sandra is the one who may wind up paying for that indifference in the end.
The tone of the film is restrained, subdued and wintry, with the screenplay (by James Gray and Richard Menello) and the direction (by Gray) astutely capturing the dreary emptiness of the characters' lives. Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw give heartbreakingly understated performances as the individuals involved in the messy triangle, as does Isabella Rossellini as Leonard's prying but devoted mother who always seems well attuned to the moods of her child.
Joaquin Phoenix has stated publicly that "Two Lovers" will be the last movie he ever makes as an actor. Let me just state right up front that, if that is indeed the case, it will be a tremendous loss both to the profession and to appreciators of fine acting everywhere.
Lying, lying, and lying for love.
2009-10-08 -
Every facet of this movie is brilliant, a tribute to the craft of moviemaking, all held together by a script so subtle and thoughtful that I am convinced that the mere reading of it would be more rewarding than viewing 90% of competing fare. It has a symmetry hinted at by the title, a play between earnest lies, and truth glibly told (in the pursuit of the ever elusive love) that follows its own internal logic to a tremendous end, and ending: Leonard (Phoenix) lies to Sandra (Shaw), and lets her down time and again, so that he may pursue Michelle (Paltrow), who lies to Leonard, and stands him up for her own hidden agenda. Big lies, small lies, lies of all shapes and sizes. So pervasive, and yet all so natural, that it made me realize, with a jolt, that this was getting dangerously real, uncomfortably close to the falsehoods with which we surround ourselves, especially in that which matters most to us.
Leonard pursues the image of Michelle to the end, willing to forsake all he knows to be true in the slim hope that she may yet prove to be true..taking us with him, against our better judgement, headlong, hoping, till the humbling truth is revealed.
Which is when Leonard is ready to receive the love truthfully and simply declared to him from the start. Does this mean that the furtive, intense grasping after an erotic fantasy is decried, and therefor healed by the two lovers locked in the awkward, public embrace with which we end? The answer is left dangling, for to us to decide. See it, and decide for youself. I, for one, prefer truth.
Bravo!!
Louis M
Odd, but beautiful and hilarious at the same time
2009-10-05 - This film is "odd" in that it leaves the viewer questioning many of the main characters' actions/decisions, and the surprise ending especially evokes a mixture of pleasant bafflement.
Mainly:
1. How does such a drop-dead GORGEOUS woman like Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) simply fall for such a bumbling oddball like Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) AND just throws herself at him like that? I kept thinking, "Dammit, some guys have ALL the luck! He didn't have to do ANY work at all, she just falls from the heavens straight into his lap and bed, practically gift-wrapped!"
2. How could any visually-unimpaired, heterosexual male even CONTEMPLATE picking a bland, generic-looking WASPish blonde like Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) who is clearly brainless and neurotic, over an exquisite goddess like Sandra?
3. And at the end: Why oh why does the universe or God or fate or whatever you wish to call it, love Leonard so much? This man truly lives a charmed life!
Throw in Phoenix's incredible performance (he steals every scene), the beautiful cinematography, Vinessa Shaw (did I tell you she's painfully gorgeous?), Isabella Rossellini (beautiful and endearing), brisk pacing, Vinessa Shaw (who's achingly gorgeous, or did I say that already?), an excellent script---and what we get is a brilliant film that is worth owning and seeing over and over again.
The world as presented in a film like this is at once beautiful and unknowable, and somehow manages to carry us in its arms no matter how impossible and absurd the situation we find ourselves in, or the characters that we are and meet. A kind of absurdist, mystical optimism.
"Two Lovers" is delightful, truly a breath of fresh air!
One Hopes This Really Isn't Phoenix's Last Film
2009-09-23 - Joaquin Phoenix bizarrely made the rounds after this film, looking like a grizzly bear and stating that he was leaving movies so that he could be a rapper. Cut to him performing as a rapper--he was atrocious! Some say that this is a joke he is playing for a film his brother-in-law Casey Affleck is making. I sure hope so. Because the truth of the matter is that Phoenix is one hell of an actor. After all, Paltrow is no slouch. She has an Oscar on her mantle. But he steals the thunder from everyone in this film. He dominates it from the first scene and never lets go.
He plays the Jewish son of a mom and pop business operation which has another mom and pop as a partner. His parents and the partner start pushing this young woman for him as a highly desirable wife. In all good conscience, in the movie at least, she comes across as better looking, with a better personality and in short, with a lot going for her. He actually seems lucky to have come up with someone this good. He plays his guy as no charismatic ball of fire. He plays him as an ok guy but no one you'd be dying to date much less marry. (Phoenix has played the opposite with equal effectiveness, exuding charisma and sexuality, again showing how good his acting chops really are).
Now here come the wrench. Gwenyth Paltrow appears and she is clearly above his touch. She is involved with an older, married professor. She is also a complete flake. You just know, if you aren't someone who is smitten with her, that she is nothing but trouble. She vacillates constantly over what she wants and flits around from interest to interest. I doubt you'd want her as a friend. So, of course, Phoenix falls for her like the proverbial ton of bricks.
To say anymore would ruin the plot. I thought it was a terrific film with an unusual plot line. It was focused, tight, well scripted and brilliantly acted.
I hope no one buys a single rap record he makes!
