The drama’s
in the details

James Gray on Joaquin Phoenix, family
dynamics and his new film Two Lovers

SELF-DESTRUCTIVE DUO:
Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow

by MARK SLUTSKY

With no Russian mobsters, corrupt officials or hard-nosed cops, Two Lovers seems at first blush like a departure for director James Gray, whose three previous films (Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night) have all hinged on some element of crime. Set in Brooklyn, Two Lovers stars Joaquin Phoenix as a depressed and aimless young man, the survivor of two suicide attempts, who lives with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov) and works for their small dry cleaning operation. When they’re in the process of selling off the store, Phoenix meets the sweet Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) and begins a tentative relationship with her just as he’s compulsively drawn to his new neighbour Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a depressive and self-destructive woman with whom he has much in common.

It’s essentially a romantic drama, and while the synopsis doesn’t hint at much of a continuity with his earlier work, it’s actually less of a departure than it would appear. “My own view is that it’s both the same and different,” says Gray, on the phone with the Mirror to promote the movie. “I think it’s different in that it does not rely at all on genre elements but certainly it’s got the same thematic concerns and it’s definitely got the same sort of mood in many ways.”

All of Gray’s movies are at heart about families, and he deals with the subject with a complexity you don’t see very often. “I think the key inside every family is a very complex dynamic,” he says. “There’s the capacity for love and support, and also for a devastating quashing of dreams, even for the best intentions. So it’s very hard to say well, the family is this, or it’s that. What’s so great about it, what makes it ripe for drama is how unendingly complex it is. That inside every family is both the capacity for love and for pain. And that struggle is what you want to explore if you’re interested, if I may use the word, in being an artist. So I’ve tried in the films to make them about that very idea.”

CREATING COMPLEXITY: Gray with Phoenix

THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST

Though set in the present day, Two Lovers has a worn look that almost suggests a period piece—the accumulation of the years is very visible. Nothing is shiny and new, and the film’s lived-in production design creates an intimate, very New York world. “It’s very conscious on my part,” Gray says. “The idea of it was always that history is really a sense of detail—of an accumulation of details. That one of the mistakes we make is assuming that people will buy furniture every year, or clothes every year. Most people don’t do that. Most people don’t have the latest plasma television on their wall.”

The film’s look also emphasizes the weight of the past and the sense that wherever the characters end up by the end, their stories will remain unfinished. “Like we always say, the bitter and the sweet, that’s what we aim for,” Gray says. “Ambiguous. Not vague—vague is when you can’t understand the details of plot so you say, well, I don’t understand what he’s doing here, why is he doing this or that. That’s a very different issue, when you literally don’t understand what’s happening in a film. But when the events are clear but the meaning of them is complicated, to me that’s a wonderful thing.”

It’s hard to bring up Two Lovers without at least some mention of the fact that its star recently, out of nowhere, grew a beard, declared he was dropping acting to pursue a career as a rapper and generally started behaving like a madman. Gray, who’s made three films with Phoenix, seems just as blindsided as the rest of us. “I didn’t even know about this thing. My wife called me into the kitchen and said ‘You better look at this.’ The laptop was sitting on the butcher block and it said ‘Joaquin Phoenix quitting acting’ and he looks like Rasputin! So I don’t know what this is, and everybody keeps asking me.

“I keep saying the same thing which is that I honestly do not know. And that I am so baffled by the behaviour and I really don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know what his ambition is. It’s a fair question, I just don’t have an answer. He’s his own man—I’ve asked him if he’s serious and he’s like ‘What do you think, man? Definitely!’ He even built a studio in his house… He’s like a crazy person, that guy!”

TWO LOVERS OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, APRIL 3