Gray, of course, isn’t the first case of an American film artist being taken more seriously abroad than at home. In the 1950s, it was the critics (including Chabrol) at the influential French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma who first championed the films of enterprising genre directors like Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann, while also arguing for the personal artistry evident in the work of such popular Hollywood filmmakers as Howard Hawks, John Ford and Nicholas Ray. In the decades since, Clint Eastwood and Mickey Rourke have been among those venerated in France years before the hometown crowd got with the program. Indeed, as the critic Michel Ciment of the French film magazine Positif suggested to me, so rich is the history of Gallic support for overlooked American masters, how could they possibly be wrong about James Gray? Well, I replied, there’s a first time for everything.
Imagine my surprise, then, when Gray returned to Cannes in 2008 with a film, Two Lovers, that not only signaled a departure from the realm of cops and robbers but seemed to me the work of a mature, sensitive artist in total control of his craft. Loosely adapted from Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights,” Two Lovers is an unexpectedly delicate romantic drama that charts the gradually deepening affection of two damaged people: Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix again), a depressive young man recovering from a suicide attempt, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the beautiful legal secretary who moves into Leonard’s Brighton Beach apartment building.
Kevin Scanlon
Post-ironic
Another chance: Phoenix and Paltrow in Two Lovers; Two collaborators: Their last film?
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Leonard’s dry-cleaner parents have taken to pressing him into courtship with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the proverbial nice Jewish girl; Michelle, meanwhile, has put too much faith in the married lawyer (Elias Koteas) who claims he’s going to leave his family for her. Through a series of exquisitely tender, unhurried exchanges, these lonely strangers come to see in each other the chance for a new beginning. And while it would surely be expecting too much for Gray to make a movie in which everyone lives happily ever after, Two Lovers is the first of his films that allows sustained passages of pleasure and hope amid the gloom — a reminder that even the Bard managed to bestow upon his tragedy-prone characters moments of grace and comic relief.
“I had been very obsessed with making a picture that had no ’80s or ’90s in it, where there would be no irony, no pretense about experimenting formally, that in a way would have an almost intentionally banal surface,” Gray told me over a recent lunch at L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills. “Underneath the surface, the ambition of it entirely — and I don’t know if it succeeds at this, but this was the intent — would be that everybody’s emotional life was completely valid.” At this, Gray has in fact succeeded, although the result is a movie that seems even further removed from the language of modern-day Hollywood romance than Gray’s crime films did from post-Tarantino snark. Nobody hooks up online or gets dumped by text message, and when the characters speak — face to face — they express their feelings simply and directly: “I love you so much” or “I can’t be with you anymore” instead of “He’s just not that into you.”
When he recently screened Two Lovers for students at USC, Gray was taken aback by the apathy the audience exhibited toward the characters’ emotional travails. “There’s this moment at the end of the film where Vinessa says to Joaquin, ‘You’re crying.’ I’ve seen that scene about a trillion times, because every time I do one of these screenings, I keep coming in around that point. But this was the first time that I’d seen the audience laugh at that moment. That’s cynicism. That’s postmodern irony. That’s them saying that any attempt at melancholy is ridiculous. I thought, ‘You know what? I think we need a draft and then all of a sudden that sense of melancholy would come back.’ I’m kidding, but I just felt very disconnected. I felt old. I’m 39 and I felt old.”
Such unironic sentiments are a hard sell at the movies these days, but Gray is helped immeasurably by a first-rate cast led by his longtime collaborator, who plays the shy, childlike Leonard with the same effortless conviction and vibrant physicality he brought to the charismatic hustlers of The Yards and We Own the Night. Of Phoenix, who has stated publicly that Two Lovers will be his last film performance before he segues into a music career, Gray says, “Joaquin has been a famous person for many years and has been acting since he was 5, and yet somehow he still understands how to be completely awkward and totally screwed up. I must say I think this is the best work he’s done for me — I hope I can get him to do it again.”
