Two Lovers

My movie-going had hit sort of a rough patch this past week. The seasonal slowdown in new Hollywood releases (probably because of Watchmen) had meant only one or two trips per week to the area multiplexes. But more importantly, I wasn't able to get to any of the new indie films in Boston.

The indies were showing up in the theater all right, but only in Cambridge, where they were playing for a single week and then disappearing into the void. Typically they might kick around from one arthouse to another for a couple weeks, giving me second and third chances, sometimes making it out to suburbs and even up to New Hampshire.

But not lately. Lately it was all one-week-and-done for most indies, and over the course of less than a month, due to illness and lack of gumption to schlep into the city, I'd had to pass up Donkey Punch, Fanboys, Waiting for Dublin, Shuttle,12, Crossing Over as well as a few more I can't remember right now. Sure, I'll catch them later on Netflix, but I like it to be my choice to wait for the DVD. Hopefully some of them will resurface later at other theaters.

Why this quick rotation of the schedule? The reason was because the holdover Oscar winners like Slumdog Millionaire and The Reader were still jamming up the slots in the arthouses. I can't really blame the theaters for this, because they don't get much revenue from most movies until after the first few weeks. Holdovers (as we used to call them back in the old days) can be lifelines, if not cash cows, and I'm always for anything that helps the folks make money who actually set up and run the projectors and tear my tickets.

Finally there was a little movement on the schedule in the last week. The Oscar ice-jam started to melt in Waltham, which is an easy driving target for me, and I had a chance on Thursday afternoon to see Two Lovers, the movie that Joaquin Phoenix was promoting when he went on David Letterman last month with a full beard and acted like a psycho. Who wouldn't look forward to that?

It was nice to be back in Waltham again, at the same parking garage next to the now-melting Charles River, across from the historic textile factory. The last time I had been there was in the dead of a cold New England winter, one that I thought would never pass.

Now as for the movie: back when I taught physics, I used to teach my students about the ubiquity of triangles in the physical world, and how to apply trigonometry to analyze vector forces. Triangles are everywhere, I would say.

The same applies in movies, where the love triangle is perhaps the most universal and repeated basic plot line. Just as in the physical world, the extensibility of the triangle in cinematic stories seems to be infinite. If it were possible to exhaust the variations of the triangle, it would have been done by now. As long as the human heart beats, there is always room for a new version.

This version is set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in an apartment building just a few blocks from the beach side Russian restaurants on Coney Island, the part called "Little Odessa" (in fact, James Gray, who directed this movie, previously made a film by that name).

In Two Lovers, Phoenix plays a depressed man who works for his family's dry cleaning business. In the opening sequence, he attempts to commit suicide by jumping from a pier into the waters of Sheepshead Bay.

It turns out it's not the first time he has tried to commit suicide. He's a very troubled man.

The opening shot of him in the water didn't give me a lot of hope for the movie, because it was an underwater sequence that showed Phoenix slumping down and sinking, until he changes his mind and swims back up for air.

This is at least the third time I have seen exactly this same sequence in the last since months. It was definitely in Max Payne, and I think it was in The Spirit too, if I remember correctly. It's right up there with the slow-motion person-being-hurled-through-plate-glass-of-a-tall-building sequence as the "signature" shots of 2008-2009. Every director wants these, for some reason, because they are cool.

But Two Lovers shows that even an overdone sequence like this can work if it advances the story correctly. This time it does. In particular, what it does is establish a "low point" for the character. A character in a movie who reaches the low point of trying to commit suicide, but then pulls back, is a character who is not going to commit suicide later on. They have already reached their point of ultimate lowness and survived. So when we see Phoenix's character at the water's edge later on, we know that he's not going to jump in. If that were his story-destiny, he would have done it in the first scene.

So back to the triangle part of the story. Phoenix's character, Leonard Kraditor, winds up having affairs with two different young women. One of them, Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), is the stable and sensible daughter of another Jewish dry cleaning family, one that is buying out the Kraditor business. Leonard's mother, played impeccably by Isabella Rossellini, loves Sandra and pushes her son to date her.

But much to his mother's consternation, Leonard has fallen for his upstairs neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who turns out to be a kept mistress of a high-powered banker who is married but won't leave his wife. Michelle is an emotional train wreck, even more unstable than Leonard. He gives her emotional support while becoming her "best friend." Of course, you can see where that is going to lead: no place good.

Michelle's oppositional placement to Sandra's stability is highlighted by the fact that Michelle is not Jewish. There's a beautiful little line in the screenplay that points this out. When Michelle first enters the Kraditor apartment, she looks on a shelf and says, "What's that thing called?" and Leonard replies "Oh, that's a dreidel". We never see the dreidel itself, and the line seems so innocuous, but for a young woman living in Little Odessa, this says volumes that she had to ask.

The triangle is fairly standard, but the kicker is that both affairs play out nearly simultaneously. That is, Leonard meets both women at almost exactly the same time, and the affairs play out side-by-side almost as a contrast to each other. Thus the novelty here, to some degree, is that the triangle is, well, an isosceles one (equal-legged). It's not boy-meets-girl, then boy-meet-another-girl. It's both-meets-two-girls.

In some ways, the two affairs are idealized versions of both a wretchedly painful affair with an emotionally unstable beauty, and a nice quiet decent courtship of a "good" girl who would make a solid wife for Leonard. The Michelle story at times seems like a riff on Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and indeed almost pays homage to that movie at times, punctuated by the use of Henry Mancini's "Lujon" for the soundtrack as the unsophisticated Leonard ventures into Manhattan to meet Holly's, I mean Michelle's, high-powered boyfriend.

Leonard's puppy-love adoration of Michelle is painful to watch at times. That's how I measure these kinds of stories. They must be painful for a man to watch another man make a fool of himself like that on screen. It must remind you of your own horrible youthful mistakes. If it isn't painful that way, then the movie didn't do its job. But this one did. Two Lovers is a tight, well-written simple story that seems to accomplish a lot without having to resort to a lot of gimmicks.

At some point in the movie, towards the end, as the two parallel love stories converge at New Year's Eve Party, I had an existential awakening about the movie. The existential awakening was this: the two idealized stories about the two women actually can be seen as representing, on a deep symbolic level, one story about one non-idealized woman, a complex real woman who is alternately both stable Sandra and erratic Michelle.

That's the power of movie storytelling, that it can fragment and dissect the complexities of human emotion and love into separate components, to see how each one of those components contributes to a unified whole, all while telling an entertaining story about interesting characters.

Components, yes. Just like triangles, and force vectors.

By the way, I must mention that in Waltham I finally made good on my vow to buy popcorn there, after having snuck in food at a previous time. I made sure to buy the largest size they had. Those theaters make a lot of money of that kind of stuff.