Intimate Impressions: The Cinema of James Gray – Act 2, Scene 2

FROM THE REMINISCENCES OF A DREAMER

 

On Two Lovers (2008)

 

The unthinkable had happened: a James Gray film had been a legitimate commercial success. We Own the Night made back two-and-a-half times what it cost to make—a feat that, to date, no other James Gray film has accomplished.[1] (Of his seven films to date, only Two Lovers and Ad Astra even made back what they cost to make.) Critically, however, Gray was still on the outs with Americans; but it didn’t matter, because this is a money industry, and Gray had finally proven his ability to be a “viable” filmmaker to those that wrote the checks. (Whether this was actually due to a genuine connection with the average filmgoer, or simply because of the tried and true combination of genre + movie stars—Joaquin Phoenix returned to theatres the very next week that October in 2007, in Reservation Road—it’s hard to say; I prefer to think the former.) We Own the Night’s team of producers at 2929 were mostly happy with what Gray had given them; anxious to work with him again, and knowing that he had a smaller film in mind that he wanted to make, they gave him a small slice of carte blanche: “Here’s 11 million dollars. You have final cut, complete creative control, go make whatever you want.” 2929 would put up the money, and then release the film on its own label, Magnolia Pictures.

Befitting its status as Gray’s quickest turnaround, it makes sense that Two Lovers and We Own the Night were born as twins, so to speak (and eventually premiering one year apart, both Cannes babies.) We recall the first film being a case of waiting, waiting, and more waiting: over six years from its conception to its completion, Gray was left with more than a little time on his hands as he waited for one thing or another to either blow over or come together. Everything more or less set to go, the main waiting game became a matter of hearing from Mark Whalberg as to his availability for shooting; it was around this time, in 2005, that Gray figured he’d fill his time by writing another movie. The script was finished about a month and a half before We Own the Night went into pre-production, and Gray says that at one point he was even contemplating which film to do first—either way, the two films were prepared, although on different timelines, almost simultaneously.

The earliest we can trace the conception of Two Lovers back to is the early-to-mid 2000s, approximately five years before the film was made, to an exchange that Gray had with Gwyneth Paltrow (a longtime friend of Gray’s by this point, who had met Gray alongside her at-the-time boyfriend Brad Pitt after the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, and had performed wonderfully in Gray’s friend Matt Reeve’s debut film from 1996, The Pallbearer)—I have competing testimonies, both from Gray, that this exchange took place at a party and that it took place over e-mail, but either way the point is the same: she said to him that she could never be in one of his films because they were all masculine, essentially challenging him to make a movie without guns, and Gray took the challenge in stride—he wanted to prove her wrong.

Two more inciting incidents: first, soon after Gray had gotten married (in May of 2005) his wife became pregnant. They went to get tested, and Gray tested positive for three genetic disorders, including Tay-Sachs, meaning that if his wife had also tested positive (she didn’t) there would have been about a 50% chance that their child would have the gene, which would almost certainly result in an early death. Gray is an Ashkenazi Jew, an ethnic group that is statistically much more susceptible to the presence of a dozen or so genetic disorders. Although he and his (non-Jewish) wife were spared the worry, Gray was told by the doctor stories of Jewish couples that had come in, both tested positive, and had broken up because of it. It was a tragic tidbit that struck Gray, and he put it in his idea drawer. Sometime later, again waiting for production on We Own the Night to get rolling, he pulled Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short novella White Nights (1848) off of his shelf for some light reading. Re-reading it, he was struck by its great tenderness in dealing with someone who was ill-equipped to deal with life and love, “the type of person that would be very reliant on pharmaceuticals in the year 2007.” The foundation of Two Lovers was born from the combination of these two ideas, the genetic tragedy forming the story’s heartbreaking backstory, and the Dostoevsky work acting as a springboard for Gray’s own personal ideas.

Enter Ric Menello. Credited as co-writer on Two Lovers’ script, Menello is about as fascinating a figure as you’ll find in the James Gray chronicles, and an under-appreciated one at that. Menello, 17 years Gray’s senior, was first introduced to Gray all the way back in 1996. Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Records and a friend of both Gray’s and Menello’s, put them together over a three-way call. Gray took to him immediately, as Menello was something of a film history savant—he seemingly knew everything about movies there was to know, a “cinematic encyclopedia.” Menello’s history is full of interesting connections that you would do well to read about for yourself, but the basic gist of his story is this: from Brooklyn, he attended NYU, which was where he met Rubin while simultaneously working as a desk clerk at one of the dorms and attending graduate school there, holding court about movies with anyone who would listen. Menello fell in with Rubin and in the late '80s worked alongside him with groups like the Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C., launching the career of the former by co-directing the “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” music video in 1987. Throughout the next decade or so, a group of like-minded friends (including Gray) circled around Rubin, who would hold screenings of rare films at his house in L.A., which Menello would attend every once in a while when visiting from New York. After taking on an unofficial consultant type role for Gray, Menello would also be introduced to a number of other filmmakers—Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Jim Jarmusch, J.J. Abrams, etc.—who he also helped out in unofficial capacities. For many of them, he would act as a kind of sounding board, someone to bounce ideas off of and who would then, with his vast memory of all kinds of films, tell them whether or not he had ever seen something similar, or lead them in interesting directions in terms of what to check out that was related.

In any event, Menello became an invaluable resource—and friend—for Gray, becoming more indispensable as Gray made more films. Having given Gray a few story suggestions and casting advice on The Yards (he pushed for Caan over Nick Nolte, and recommended Thomas Milian for the union rep role), Gray wanted to give him some kind of honorary credit on the film; but as Menello wasn’t a member of the Writers Guild of America, they couldn’t find a credit that the WGA would allow—“Advisor to the Director” was struck down, so he remained uncredited (which he says he didn’t mind.) He did more creative work on We Own the Night, helping re-write the script, providing input on casting, even writing a few scenes from scratch, and this time he was officially credited for it in what capacity he could be: “By then James had found out the WGA did not control the credits 'Consultant to the Filmmakers' and 'Production Consultant'. We thought the former sounded cooler so that was it.”

Menello worked on Two Lovers with Gray almost from the beginning. Starting work on the film’s script, Gray would constantly call up Menello, talking over basic story ideas, reading scenes to him, and going over story and dialogue for multiple hours per day. After a few months of work on the first draft, Gray realized that Menello’s invaluable contributions meant that he was essentially writing it with him, so he decided to make it an official, genuine collaboration. Outside of the film, however, there were more reasons than just his artistic contribution that led Gray to wanting him recognized as an official co-writer. Gray notes that Menello had been very reliant on his mother, and her death around that time sparked something of a mental breakdown in Menello, who was then hospitalized for a while. In an attempt to help out, Gray, along with other mutual friends including Rick Rubin, Owen Wilson, and Menello’s former NYU roommate Adam Dubin, decided to split the rent and get Menello moved into an apartment in Brooklyn after he was released from the hospital. If Menello were given official credit as Gray’s co-writer, this would mean his official entrance into the W.G.A. and therefore the health benefits that came along with that status, plus the money and residuals from the film script itself.

Gray reports that Menello rarely left his home and was secretive about parts of his life; after Two Lovers, Menello had been working on a few scripts of his own, including a biography of the singer Jimmy Roselli, but he never sent them to Gray to read even after he had been asked and had agreed to send them. Through anecdotes from Gray, one gets the sense that he was a private person, even though it was clear that he was active in the film community at least in some capacity for some time. He even recorded a couple of audio commentaries for DVDs of Claude Chabrol films, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this wonderful anecdote about the Gray / Menello / Chabrol connection:

When James Gray was at Cannes with Two Lovers he was sitting next to Chabrol at an event. And Chabrol loved James Gray.  He goes, “You're the only American director I like.”  And James thanks him.  And Chabrol goes, “I was shocked when I saw the name Ric Menello and I was wondering, could it be the same Ric Menello who used to write to me in the 80's?”  And James says, “Yes, Ric told me about that.”  And Chabrol says, “Why did he stop writing?”  James replied, “I don't know, I guess he didn't want to bother you.  That's the way Ric is. “ And Chabrol says, “No, no, no.”  He gave him his contact information.  “You must tell him to get in touch with me.”  So Ric was thrilled.  And I said, “Why didn't you go to Cannes?”  And he goes, “Well, a couple of reasons.”  I said, “Well what's one?”  “I don't have a passport.” “That's a good reason.”

Gray continued to work with Menello on his next film, The Immigrant, and considered it a no-brainer to collaborate again both for the genuine artistic help and so that Menello would retain the benefits that came with it. He would die at the age of 60 in 2013, shortly after getting to see the completed film.

(It’s important to note here, however, that the portrait painted of Menello by Gray has been disputed by many of Menello’s close friends and family. In the wake of Menello’s passing, Richard Brody of The New Yorker published two articles in memory of Menello, using Gray and Rick Rubin as his main sources. Friends of Menello published written rebuttals of Brody’s pieces, claiming that he and others had mischaracterized Menello as a hermit and a loner when that wasn’t at all the case. They even created a website dedicated to honoring the truth of Menello’s life and legacy. Some of the rebuttals are quite harsh and passionate, even accusing Gray of abusing Menello’s willingness to help and having a much rockier working relationship than the one Gray presented to the public. Suffice it to say, I’m in no position to say which side is more truthful than the other; I merely present the basic facts here in a spirit of transparency, and anyone who wants to look into it more for themselves can do so using the links provided.)

 

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Two Lovers had been written (in about four weeks’ time, once the outline was completed) specifically for Joaquin Phoenix—specifically specifically. If he refused to do it, Gray literally would not make the film. And at first that’s exactly what happened: after Gray approached him on the set of We Own the Night asking him about it, he said he didn’t like the script. It was only after that movie had finished that he came back to Gray and said, “You remember that script you wrote?.... I think it’s time to do Kradditor.” (Hearing Gray tell the story is essential, as you get a much better sense of Phoenix’s sheepishness upon admitting that he had been afraid to do it at first.) The movie exists on his shoulders (often literally—in one of the film’s most important scenes, he acts entirely with his back to the camera), and he more than lives up to his role, bringing a dedication to his inhabitation of—his disappearance into—Leonard Kradditor that can be encapsulated in one simple anecdote: Gray would get to set at 6:00 a.m., three hours before the actors had to be there, and would often see Phoenix sitting in a corner with tears rolling down his cheeks. Gray would ask what was wrong, and Phoenix would reply in the negative—that he was simply preparing for the day.

Although Gray says that he wrote the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow specifically in mind, we get a slightly contradictory peek under the hood courtesy of Ric Menello, who claims that Gray originally wrote it for Phoenix and Charlize Theron—per Menello, he was the one who suggested Paltrow halfway through the first draft of the script; they finished it with her in mind, and then went back to revise the first half accordingly. (When it was still envisioned with Theron, Menello says that there were two scenes of Phoenix going to see her character’s father, to be played by James Caan; but the scenes were considered unnecessary and were cut early on.) For the third member of the triangle, Vinessa Shaw, famed for her role in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999); Gray had wanted someone like the young Claudia Cardinale in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), and was eventually won over to Shaw by the fact that she was actually Jewish (her real name is Schwartz.) Shaw’s mother is played by Julie Budd, a famous singer from the 1970s who had been slated to be the next Barbara Streisand, here in only her second film appearance. Joaquin’s parents in the film are also brilliant pieces of casting: Moni Moshonov, an actor Gray had discovered in Dover Koshashvili’s Late Marriage (2001), an Israeli film that has a similar DNA to Two Lovers within its own specific cultural milieu; and Isabella Rossellini, who Gray had suggested after considering two German actresses, Fassbinder alumni Hanna Schygulla and Barbara Sukowa, as well as Elena Solovey, Moshonov’s wife in We Own the Night and a recurring character actor for Gray, but her English was too poor and Menello liked Rossellini—she reminded him of his mother.

The month-long shoot started in November of 2007, and according to Gray it was the happiest he had ever been during a shoot—which can be reasonably chalked up to the fantastic experience he had with his actors, perhaps the central element in Gray’s filmic conceptions, so much so that they don’t just structure his mise-en-scène, but create it. Those elaborate master shots that Gray had abandoned on The Yards due to his actors’ youth are back again here, and one gets the sense that within these long takes Gray’s actors, more than ever, were given free rein to discover the characters with each other. À la The Yards’ dialectic between actors of older and younger generations, and the productive tensions that that set-up created for Gray’s direction of his actors, on Two Lovers Gray went into production worried that the differing acting approaches of Phoenix and Paltrow would cause trouble; Phoenix traditionally preferred multiple takes (which Gray was always happy to oblige), discovering the character as the number of takes racked up, while Paltrow traditionally preferred fewer takes, being a very prepared and precise actress. Gray needn’t have worried, however, because what was created was a wonderful dynamic between the two, leading to a harmonious set: Phoenix became more disciplined while Paltrow became looser, and their on-set dialectic set the stage for a very productive tension which resulted in, let’s not beat around the bush, not just those two’s respective career-best performances, but two of the greatest performances in the history of cinema.

I may have mentioned this already and may mention it again, but to me Gray’s success with actors can be narrowed down to one small fact: he loves them. So much so, in fact, that Gray notoriously laughs on set whenever he sees a good take, even takes of incredibly serious moments—sometimes to the point of ruining takes. Gray’s reasoning for this behavior of his points toward a kind of pure enjoyment of moviemaking, the only stage of filmmaking really in his control:

Sometimes I see things that I feel are really honest and truthful human behaviour and that to me is—there's something very enjoyable and pleasing about the experience because really you have to live for the process. You have to make films not for what the result will be. I mean, you hope everybody loves it, but no movie ever has been made where 100 percent of people think it's great. I mean, you could choose the most popular movie ever and somebody hates it. So you can't be result-oriented and also be process-oriented. So you have to enjoy the making of the film and, for me, what I enjoy is actors, so I laugh when I enjoy myself, you know?

If Gray stays his modest self when it comes to taking credit for eliciting such performances, we can point to other things he does besides specifically “directing” performances (which he claims he does very little of), things that create an on-set environment conducive to an atmosphere of naturalism and vulnerability. For example, Two Lovers was shot entirely on location, in real places and spaces. The interiors, mostly shot in an apartment complex Gray found in New Jersey, are real interiors—no widened hallways, no cutaway walls, none of that. The actors and crew had to navigate the probably claustrophobic spaces as they existed, and it makes for not only performances grounded in ontological reality but also for a particularly intimate camera-actor relationship; there’s nowhere to hide—physically, and then also emotionally.

When you have a movie where you didn’t build any sets, and you have to work very quickly and it’s very cold and so forth, then you are forced to expose yourself completely emotionally. I think it’s all part of the same piece because that tangible thing when you walk into a real apartment where you can smell the brisket, I think it very much informs the actor, and that rawness of emotion, the emotional authenticity you hope comes through, is in part a by-product of the environment that you have set up for the actors. As hard and as miserable as it is, it informs the authenticity of their emotions.

Gray intentionally decided to set-design the movie as little as possible; the furniture, the wall art, the photographs were all mostly borrowed, quite literally, from the home of Gray’s father. As we saw with the deathly interiors of Little Odessa’s apartment space, the Kradditor home in Two Lovers is made up of layers and layers of banal history: a film set in the 2000s but with furniture and the like from decades back into the 20th century, because that’s true to life. The wall of photographs in the apartment, prominently on display in the lead up to Phoenix and Shaw’s love scene, are all photos of Gray’s family, barring the addition of photographs of the actors when they were younger; when Phoenix tells Shaw about the Workman’s Circle dance where his parents met, the anecdote is actually taken from the story of Gray’s grandparents meeting. Although ostensibly a Hollywood film of a modest yet mid-sized budget, everything feels intimate and localized like a low-budget indie movie; or, as stated by Gray, “I’ve tried to make them as close as I can to home movies.”

Ironically, all of this is in contradistinction to Luchino Visconti’s (far more literal) adaptation of White Nights, 1957’s Le notti bianche, which he shot entirely on a soundstage, with fake snow and everything. It serves as a perfect example, alongside Gray’s film, of the truth that there is no “right” way of making movies—masterpieces can spawn from circumstances and styles far removed from each other. Including Visconti’s wonderful version of the material, a fantastical piece of filmmaking like theatre in three dimensions, there have been no less than ten adaptations of one kind or another of Dostoevsky’s short story; most notable being Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), a rare but essential late Bresson which is of course a sui generis masterpiece, as tender as a slap and finding something in the material that only Bresson could. Also worth noting is Paul Vecchiali’s version, White Nights on the Pier (2014), made when he was 84 years old; I haven’t seen it, but I’m sure it’s of interest, not least because of Vecchiali’s bold comments about Two Lovers: “Unfortunately, it’s not that I don’t like that film, it’s that I hate it.”

But the relation of Dostoevsky to Two Lovers has been both over- and understated. The film is a spiritual adaptation of White Nights at most; little of the plotting has been retained save the existence of the main two characters. Joaquin Phoenix is a match for the unnamed narrator, and Gwyneth Paltrow for Nastenka, the girl. Elias Koteas’ character is a version of Nastenka’s lover who she awaits the return of, and Vinessa Shaw is a complete addition—the Dostoevsky story similarly ends with the girl, at the last minute, finally in the arms of her long-awaited lover, the narrator rejected, but Gray goes one more step and doesn’t leave the narrator alone, creating a new character for him to retreat back to. Dostoevsky’s ending—for my money the greatest in all of literature—has the narrator reflecting on whether or not these few nights he had with this girl on the bridge constitute enough love to last a lifetime. Gray’s ending—for my money, what the heck, the greatest in all of cinema—has.... something else (we’ll get there). Phoenix’s Leonard Kradditor (the name is stolen from one of Gray's father's childhood friends) is more of a combination character, part narrator of White Nights and part Dostoevsky’s “underground man,” who the narrator is an earlier version of, although the more drawn out characterization occurs in Dostoevsky’s post-exilic Notes from the Underground (1964). If we’ve already seen how important Dostoevsky is for the Gray project (c.f. Brothers Karamazov for Little Odessa and The Idiot for The Yards), here we get another view on the matter in the form of two smaller, earlier works. Gray speaks of his inspiration coming not so much from other movies, but from the desire to “put a Dostoevskian, underground man character in a domestic situation” (another parallel reference for Gray: The Metamorphosis’s Gregor Samsa). His outsized mood swings would be updated for the age of pharmaceuticals, in Two Lovers likely suffering from some kind of bipolar disorder. The theme of medical ailments gets spread further around too—Paltrow’s character claims to have ADHD, and Vinessa Shaw works at the pharmaceutical company Pfizer (in 2008 a reference that needed explaining, not so much in our post-Covid era).

And to return to the lede of the previous paragraph, if Two Lovers’ relation to White Nights specifically has been a bit oversold, Gray’s relation to Dostoevsky in general has been an overlooked spiritual/artistic connection. It’s no coincidence that if one picks up Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, one is greeted in one of the opening monologues with a description that could have come straight out of a reading of Two Lovers’ theme of following desires to one’s knowing detriment:

Who was it that first said that man does nasty things only because he doesn’t know where his real interests lie, that if he were enlightened about his true interests, he would immediately stop acting like a pig and become kind and noble? Being enlightened, the argument goes on, and seeing where his real advantage lay, he would realize that it was in acting virtuously. And, since it is well established that a man will not act deliberately against his own interests, it follows that he would have no choice but to become good. Oh, the innocence of it! Since when, in these past thousands of years, has man acted exclusively out of self-interest? What about the millions of facts that show that men, deliberately and in full knowledge of what their real interests were, spurned them and rushed in a different direction? They did so at their own risk without anyone advising them, refusing to follow the safe, well-trodden path and searching for another path, a difficult one, an unreasonable one, stubbornly working their way along it in the darkness. Doesn’t this suggest that stubbornness and willfulness were stronger in these people than their interests?

The other way in which Gray and Dostoevsky sit in the same camp of artists is simply in their total and absolute loving embrace of their flawed characters. There’ll be more to say about this when the time comes, but this is, for me, the true connection between these two artists. As Gray says, “The movie would be in love with everyone in it—there would be no distancing, and you would never be able to look down on any of the characters. Everybody would be given his or her own moment to be understood and loved.” For Gray, this is a “very Franciscan” idea that he steals for his secular religion of art; for Dostoevsky, a profoundly Christian idea that connected man and his actions to a very real God. The result, on page or screen, is more or less the same: pure empathy.

 

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For the first time in his career working with the same cinematographer on consecutive films, Gray returned to work with Joaquin Baca-Asay after their collaboration on We Own the Night; but it was a bit different this time. Gray says that they didn’t speak much, instead communicating via art. Following Gray’s claim that he was more inspired by literature than whole films (“What were more crucial, I think, were literary sources. I tried to steal very little from other films stylistically and instead tried to base it in a very literary tradition, which may be why it feels old-fashioned. I even chose a font, a typeface, for the opening title that was very like a 1960s Philip Roth novel. That's how insane and specific I got.”), he spoke with Baca-Asay through music and painting. He would play him a piece of music, or show him a painting or photograph, or merely a scene from a film (essentially the combination of music and painting, when talking mood), and through this Baca-Asay would discover a feeling or a mood that Gray wished to communicate—and take it one step further. According to Gray, Baca-Asay “always gave me something better than what I had in mind.” Gray showed less films than ever to his team, both a sign of Gray’s growing maturity as an autonomous filmmaker and a result of the fact that there existed almost no movies (particularly American ones) in the serious, romantic key Gray wanted to work in.

Beyond a few lower key moments from The Graduate (1967) (one thinks of the walking-around-campus montage set to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair / Canticle” for a spiritual antecedent, while for straight stealing we get the awkward, handheld one-shot following Dustin Hoffman in the film’s opening repeated here in Joaquin Phoenix’s late-film exit from the New Year’s party)—beyond that, the main American touchstones were Hitchcock: Vertigo (1958), and Rear Window (1954), and Vertigo again. Rear Window gets mentioned for its across-the-apartment-courtyard voyeurism, but it’s Vertigo’s deadly serious take on love as desire that looms largest in Two Lovers’ playbook. The rooftop scenes in the latter play out as slower, more mythic versions of the former’s terrifyingly quick bell tower scenes, and the explicit manifestations of desire in Vertigo via the literal remaking of desire’s object in the desirer’s mental image of the desired is in Two Lovers played out implicitly, here in the mold of ancient tragedy where Vertigo borders on the invention of a new genre, call it the horror melodrama. I’d say more about Hitchcock specifically and Gray’s use of cinematic references more generally, but nothing I would write could approach the dense elegance of what Zach Campbell already wrote back in 2009:

Obsolescence is part of the charm not only because Gray is making "old-fashioned" movies, or because movies like these are rare in multiplexes. His virtues are classical ones, in the bigger scheme of cinema; appreciating him is a Lukacsian endeavor rather than Brechtian. His appeal is textual, which is not to say that there aren't fascinating allusive and intertextual qualities here: for instance Two Lovers nails its loose but pungent deployments of Rear Window and Vertigo, if you ask me—the citations are neither pretenses for meta activity, nor are they banking on loaned-out gravitas. (Even if one were both cynical and unappreciative of Gray, one would be foolish to say he freeloads off of Hitchcock or any other filmmaker, for the simple reason that if he needs to appeal to older texts for weight and mythology, he feels supremely comfortable gesturing towards Greek tragedy, opera, Dostoyevsky: if it's authority and status he's after, Hitchcock is small fries...) The Hitchcock blonde is also the shiksa goddess is also the shrewd portrait of moneyed upbringing is also a specter (the final scene) is also ... i.e., Gray works all of his thematics, all his allusions, all his textual levels into a cohesive multi-layered pattern with dexterity most directors would, must, should envy.

And if I had to add one last attempt to bring American movies into the picture here, I’ll follow Gray’s fascinating suggestion in regards to what emotional key he was after, “which would be a love story almost directed by the thriller side of Roman Polanski,” or, what if a movie gave you the impossibly gut-wrenching knottedness of Chinatown (1974) in the guise of a straight-up romance movie?

“If someone says ‘I love you’ in this film, they mean it. It’s not held up as a fucking joke.” For Gray, Two Lovers would be the anti-romcom, a genre which American cinema has historically been wonderful at, and yet to the almost complete neglect of the serious romantic drama. (Maybe the closest we ever came, as an industry, was in the churning out of melodramas from the '20s to the '50s—Borzage, Sirk, etc.—or what was condescendingly called the “women’s picture,” something that Gray would explicitly take up in his next film.) Gray wanted to make something absent irony, the most earnest film one could possibly imagine. In the realm of romance, even historically this is a rarity—not even Shakespeare would dabble in the serious romantic drama, only brushing up against it once with Romeo & Juliet. Travelling out into the wider world (and ignoring the existence of Fellini for now, who we’ll get to in a brief moment), if I had to pick one movie to pair with Two Lovers it would be Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love (1988), the feature-length expansion of the “adultery” episode from his Dekalog TV series. It’s a film that never cracks a single smirk at the actions of its characters, merely observing and embracing their desires and actions with a non-judgmental and loving camera, as absurd as they may be. It’s beautiful, and even as I’ve forgotten much of it a year after viewing, I would unhesitatingly place it among the greatest movies about desire ever made.

But if we’re going to cover all our bases in talking about truly serious art, art that embraces big emotions without ever laughing at them, we of course must make mention of opera, specifically Gray’s beloved verismo opera, which—after toying with the idea on The Yards—finally sees its appearance in Two Lovers in the form of classical guitar arrangements courtesy of Chris Spelman. Gray had consulted Spelman, his friend and former middle school Latin teacher, on We Own the Night; as a test, Spelman had flown to Prague in order to record a piece from Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (1910). Costing a relatively little $4000, it was beautiful, but it didn’t seem right to Gray for that movie—he instead repaid Spelman’s unused contributions by getting him to do the music for Two Lovers. The main guitar pieces are arrangements of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut (1893), an ill-fated cross-class love story and a masterpiece of music. “Sola, perduta, abbandonata,” [“Alone, lost, abandoned”] and “Fra le tue braccia, amore!” [“In your arms, beloved!”], the penultimate and final arias of the opera respectively, are both used throughout as main motifs and are among the most beautiful music ever (re)composed for a film. The music from Manon Lescaut returns repeatedly, for example in the hospital scene with Paltrow, there morphing into a lilting composition for contrabass and harp. Puccini appears again in the guise of a different work—the Act 1 aria “Signor, ascolta!” from Turandot (1926)—as well as selections from elsewhere in the history of Italian opera: “Una furtiva lagrima” from Act 2 of Gaetano Donizetti’s Elixir of Love (1831), used in Phoenix and Shaw’s love scene, as well as diegetic selections from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890), a sort of tragic outer-borough love story, a work with significant cinematic history: you’ll find its interlude used memorably in the slow-motion opening of Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), and the opera and its staging plays an important role in the momentous final hour of Coppola’s The Godfather: Part III (1990).[2]

From Italian opera to Italian cinema: if you had to choose only one country’s art to engage with in order to understand Gray, that country would be Italy.

To me, Italian cinema from 1945 to 1980 is the greatest stretch of national cinema in the history of the world. American and French movies are the overall winners in terms of cultural contributions. But Italian cinema is my favorite. You’re talking Rossellini, Fellini, Visconti, de Sica, Francesco Rosi, Dino Risi, Mario Bava, Elio Petri, Ettore Scola, up through Lina Wertmüller, really. There’s an expression of humanity in them. There’s a level of compassion and empathy for the characters depicted in these that is deeply moving to me.

As I’ve said before, contrary to his surface reputation Gray has always been more of a '50s European filmmaker than a '70s American one, and his deep and abiding connection with 20th century Italian cinema and the opera that preceded it makes sense because it’s a nation whose culture has been melodramatic in the best artistic sense. So Two Lovers, though gesturing at a kind of gritty New Hollywood realism, becomes more and more indisputably like a 1950s Italian movie as it goes on. And when I say 1950s Italian movie I really mean a 1950s Fellini movie.[3] No other film in Gray’s body of work is as explicitly inspired, structurally and metaphysically, by another movie as Two Lovers is—except, that is, for The Immigrant, which equally with Two Lovers is a complex amalgamation of Fellini’s La strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957). These four films mix and mingle to an historic degree, in areas both banal (plot) and sublime (spiritual transcendence), that it’s no coincidence that one could not unreasonably pick these four as the greatest movies ever made and then call it a day. It’s not hard to pick out the resemblances: the beginning of Two Lovers quotes that of Nights of Cabiria—Joaquin Phoenix jumps into Sheepshead Bay, Giulietta Masina is pushed into a river, and both try to run off after being saved when people try to help them and/or notice who they are; skipping to the back end of the films, both Phoenix and Masina are happy and ready to move on in their lives with new loves, only to end up abandoned and devastated—but both Gray and Fellini add a tincture of sweetness to the bitterness, not dispelling the tragedy but sublimely undercutting it for endings of transcendent ambiguity and paradox. As Spelman’s “Sola, perduta, abbandonata” acts for Gray, so does Nino Rota’s “Lla ri lli ra” for Fellini.

To add even more cinematic and mythic resonance, Phoenix on the beach near the end of Two Lovers implicitly quotes Anthony Quinn on the beach at the end of Fellini’s La strada. Quinn’s reaching up to the sky is a nice metaphor for what unites Gray and Fellini on a higher scale: in both, there is a profound hoping and dreaming for something, usually something outside of reality, and yet something which the characters desire above all to make a reality. This thematic is embodied in the form: there is a separation—even while they are so inescapably, intimately tied—between reality and non-reality, which isn’t fantasy but rather merely a step beyond reality, a kind of post-realism. Fellini, coming onto the scene as a director just after they heyday of Italian neorealism, started from a point definitively beyond the core neorealist texts; for example, Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), two films Fellini had assisted on as a writer. Leading up to his first directorial efforts, Fellini was thinking in the direction of a “cinema of Reconstruction”; after Paisan, he explicitly stated how he intended to slightly shift the goals of neorealism, instead “looking at reality with an honest eye – but any kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him.” If neorealism had been a bit too hardheaded in attempting to capture uncapturable objective reality, then the post-neorealism proposed by Fellini would give in to less material impulses in search of an even greater, more encompassing reality—a reality on multiple planes of being, not just what could be objectively captured by the recording device known as the film camera.[4] If this was still some kind of neorealism, then it was almost a kind of post-political neorealism, where the need to make immediate wartime or post-war political statements via cinema faded into the background to make room for a more operatic something that would refocus cinema on the spiritual side of the individual, now out of harm’s way of immediate physical danger. (And if Rossellini’s adoption of his own kind of post-neorealism beginning with his Ingrid Bergman-starring films is any indication, Fellini was certainly onto something....)

If James Gray’s first three films had been unthinkingly boxed in with a kind of realist cinema, then with Two Lovers it should have been clear that Gray was operating within a different kind of realism, à la the post-neorealism of Fellini—Gray’s world isn’t “realist,” but rather it’s Gray’s subjective paraphrase of the real world. Entering American movie theatres in the year 2009, the film was entirely in its own universe. Gray set out to make something which he called “unfashionably true to itself”—a work of art that “doesn’t care about anything except having an internal and inherent integrity.” Gray was attacking the two poles of contemporary cliché cinema: on the one hand, Hollywood, with its increasing disregard of formal seriousness, and on the other hand, Art House Realism^TM, the post-Dardennes faux-verité films crowding European film festivals—neither which Gray felt to be honest, something he required himself and his films to be: “The only thing I care about is that my films are emotionally direct and emotionally honest.” This directness would knowingly result in something that was so absent of flashiness that it would border on ordinary: “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.” And how would this manifest itself? In a form that is so fluid and “normal”—classical, if we must say it—that it’s easy to miss just how crazy good, and unique, it is. Gray himself locates a few specifics that, by small but significant formal gestures, separate him from the crowd; the response is in elaboration of the idea that he designed camera movement to “communicate a sense of fate or inevitability,” but it works just as well as a general overview of what pushes his form from banality to mythicism:

There are two things that go into that. The first is a little bit more of a God’s-eye view, and I don’t mean the camera’s up high, although there are times when that is the case. But usually what I mean is that there will be long takes and a certain level of visual distance, not emotional distance, which enables the viewer’s eye to roam around the image and find who or what that person wants to look at. In other words, a master held a little bit longer than in most American movies and not cutting to close-ups, and so forth. Secondly, it’s also there to a degree in camera movement, particularly in the slow zoom, as it either moves in or moves out. The slow zoom seems to indicate the unnatural, inexorable move, and that’s always what you’re doing, trying to find the root to someone’s unconscious in a conscious way. There is no natural equivalent of the zoom. It is very cinematic and almost mechanical. So there are times when we use very slow zooms to indicate a kind of inexorability. Also, we sometimes employed a meditative move of the camera in which the entire playing out of the story seems almost predetermined in that the viewer is not directed to look in a specific place, and they are not specifically conscious of it. The camera will be moving so slowly that, after a while, there is a two-shot when it was a wide. This is in contrast to cutting, where the intent is very specific and immediate.

These maneuvers are small but meaningful; you don’t even really notice them (as Gray intended that you shouldn’t) since you’re so caught up in the emotional momentum of the narrative. And it certainly doesn’t matter, in the moment, whether or not any one specific formal gesture had any one specific thematic idea behind it, intentionally. Movies work on a more primal level than that, but I (through Gray) mention them merely to pin down some inventory of specific cinematic techniques, rather than work from vague abstracts as I usually might. Because with a style like Gray’s, it’s almost too easy to ignore it, lump it in with that of “classical” filmmakers, or simply shake your head and say, Well, I don’t know how to describe it, but whatever it is it works. I’d lean towards the third option so as not to be accused of completely sidestepping the issue nor of shallow cliché criticism that merely restates conventional wisdom. But I’ve put some thought into it, and the closest I can come to an accurate description of Two Lovers’ form is this: Fordian classicism plus, like, mumblecore lol.[5]

I’m mostly serious... Joaquin Phoenix’s fumbling and self-flagellating attempts at conversation as Gwyneth Paltrow hides in his apartment (hilarious, and also a scene, as of my last viewing of the film, that I can’t get through without becoming emotional) are a small summation of a certain strain of the late-‘00s/early-‘10s American independent film project, except in a movie with an actual budget and actual movie stars. The occasional moment of handheld camera throughout adds credence to my point. But all this in a movie that’s as formally streamlined and narratively tight as a John Ford film. (In an interview around the time, Gray shared that his wife had given him the 24-film Ford at Fox DVD box set for Christmas....) It's the Fordian tradition that Gray humbly tries to work in, even if he knows, as we all secretly do, that no one is the man’s match—“Ford is upsettingly good,” says Gray. “Like to the point where I don’t understand how he makes films.”[6] For both Ford and Gray, story is as or more important than form, and even if they both know that a strong form is a necessary corollary to telling a good story, they also know the primal importance of narrative’s skeleton to not just a meaningful film but a meaningful form.

The story of Two Lovers is simple, verging on the banal. “Character A loves character B, character C loves character A... so simple,” says Gray, “that it could become almost elemental.” Call them archetypes, not clichés—these are characters out of a thousand-year-old narrative tradition, specific enough to conjure a realistic contemporary embodiment and yet vague enough to fit the glove of universality. As much as I’m willing to be lumped in with a certain tradition of post-war Cahiersian cinephilia, which exalts form over content, style over story—and in their own way, they’re right—I’m also not going to pretend that for thousands of years of human history storytelling, oral or otherwise, wasn’t the main artistic medium for communicating the subtleties and complexities of human life and the world. [7] At the risk of making myself or Gray sound like old fogeys talking about telling stories around the campfire, story matters.[8] Gray has gotten into a bit of trouble bad-mouthing a certain kind of post-1968 post-Godard cinema for what he sees as its self-indulgent, egotistic deconstruction of narrative that leaves us stranded in terms of the historical building blocks of narrative art. If Gray can at times be overly harsh towards certain kinds of work on the other side of the cinematic spectrum from his own films, it’s still easily identifiable as a passion that sprouts from a deep, deep desire to recognize the human need, the ongoing necessity, for the fantasy of narrative. As he bluntly put it:

We’ve now acknowledged that our indulgence in narrative is a bullshit fantasy that we require. We’ve deconstructed it. Okay, good. So now what? We can just go ahead and say the fantasy is nonsense and bullshit, so then fine, you can just kill yourself now. What’s important is that now that we’ve acknowledged that the fantasy is bullshit—that our need for narrative, our need for the extension of sympathy, is some kind of extension of our desires—now we have to delve even further into that fantasy.

In other words, the fantasy of narrative is a necessary lie. It’s a lie that must be given in to, must be surrendered to, must be embraced with no distance. Because we need it. My own take is that engaging with narrative is the only way to escape the perspective of our own lives, and thus the only way to get perspective on them. It’s nearly impossible to narrativize our own lives as we live them, blind to the greater cosmic shifts working in and around us because of our own myopia and/or the simple fact that moment to moment, life is hard, and it requires you give it disproportionately close attention just to stay afloat. Engaging with a narrative is a way to briefly exit your own head for a moment, and while I suggest this allows you to ponder your own life from a kind of third-person perspective, it also, more significantly, parallels and gives birth to the idea that other people exist, too—call it empathy, or what Google tells me has been coined sonder: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that a simple reliance on narrative would result in ideas lacking complexity. But a curious paradox emerges from this strict dedication to the shackles of story. Gray says it like this: “we want to tell the story so clearly that the ambiguity can emerge.” Ambiguity from clarity, complexity from simplicity. All you have to do is watch Two Lovers to understand this first hand. It’s here we find a relation between Gray and a filmmaker ostensibly far removed from him: Luis Buñuel. If the ambiguity of Buñuelian endings is reached by an explicitly fantastical absurdity, wherein is produced an irresolvable, unexplainable endpoint that still retains knotted meaning amidst its apparent oddness, then the ambiguity of Grayian endings is reached by a kind of explicitly realist banality; the same point is reached, a parallel feeling produced, except the process has been through the ostensibly dull roads of story, structure, and character. But if Buñuel’s is an intellectual ambiguity, Gray’s is an emotional one—the power of his endings, and his films in general, is not in deviating from the history of narrative art, but burrowing deeper into it than any of his forbears imagined that they could go. Gray tells us that he feels it’s his obligation “to revisit traditional forms of storytelling but almost double down on the emotion of it.” It’s in this quote that I would locate what is, for me, the single greatest “idea” that the filmography of James Gray presents to us, uniquely embodies for us; the skeleton key for the entire James Gray project.

 

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Just as I’ve gotten done telling you that Two Lovers is a serious romance, I’m going to tell you that it’s actually also a comedy. Or at least Gray is going to tell you that, as he and Phoenix were “laughing and laughing and laughing throughout filming. We kind of felt that we were making a comedy.” At an early screening for a couple dozen people, Gray learned that what he saw as something having a good dose of hilarity was seen by others as purely tragic. “That’s one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen,” the people would say to him. But even as it retains its tragic streak, Two Lovers is, in relative terms, easily Gray’s funniest film to date. Joaquin Phoenix’s character is a bit of a joker, and makes a fool of himself both intentionally and unintentionally throughout—c.f. his disappearing-down-the-imaginary-steps routine that he performs for the women at his parents’ dry-cleaning shop, or to go back to a scene I’ve already mentioned, Phoenix’s attempt to entertain Paltrow in his apartment after first meeting her: after making a “lame” joke about not knowing how to speak dog, Phoenix’s facial gesture and self-flagellating eye-roll undercuts the humor, shifting the mood of the moment to the instantly relatable embarrassment of making a fool of oneself in front of someone one is trying to impress. It’s comedy tinged with melancholy, but comes off more like melancholy tinged with comedy (and therefore the comedy is forgotten)—it’s the reverse image of Chaplin, who perfected the melancholy-tinged comedy like no one else (to the point that some people forget just how melancholic his comedies are.) But Gray knew that this film with Phoenix would be a tragedy-pervasive comedy, and he specifically worked with him on Chaplin and Giulietta Masina, “two comic actors who handle the most essential distress.”

Anyone who’s even vaguely aware of Gray’s personality knows that he has a huge comic streak in him; a kind of class clown as a kid, his interview presence is made even more entertaining than it otherwise would be by his surprising (given the films) sense of humor. He’s a funny dude, and people have noticed; more than one filmmaker has tried to get Gray to act in one of their films. Most famously, Wes Anderson wanted him to play the character of Vladimir Wolodarsky in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004); but Anderson’s long shooting schedule in Rome’s Cinecittà studios was too big of an ask for Gray, and the part is instead played in the film by Noah Taylor. Around the time of Ad Astra’s production, Luca Guadagnino also contacted Gray about him playing a role in a project of his. But the closest he ever came to acting in a film is in one he actually did, but then got left on the cutting room floor: Theodore Witcher’s Love Jones (1997). It’s worth quoting Witcher at length to get the whole story:

James and I have been close friends for over 20 years. As filmmakers do, when he’s working on a picture, he’ll ask for my input. I’ll read the script and give him notes and go to early screenings. He does the same for my material. I didn’t know he put me in the credits [of The Lost City Of Z], though. That’s very nice.

I think he’s credited in Love Jones, actually. James had a scene that I cut out, believe it or not. We had the same producer—Nick Wechsler produced Little Odessa, and also produced Love Jones. That’s how we met. I wrote a scene for him at the beginning. He plays a guy who works at the newspaper with Larenz the day he’s quitting his job. I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed James, but he’s a character. I thought, “This guy has to be in the movie.” And he’s not the guy who would usually be in a quote-unquote “black movie.”

It’s less so now, but at the time, there were all these rules you had to follow. If you were making a mainstream movie, there’s the cool black friend. If you’re making a black movie, there’s the corny white-guy friend. I was like, “I don’t know any corny white guys.” So let me have the sharpest, most unique, idiosyncratic white guy be Darius’s friend at the newspaper. [Laughs] James came to Chicago. He had never acted before. As I was finishing the movie, I was trying to make it shorter. The scene was expository, so it wound up getting cut. But I think I left his name in the credits. So maybe he paid me back 20 years later.

And of course one has to mention Gray’s penchant for impersonating voices, probably his funniest trait, as in interviews he will never reference what another person said without impersonating how they said it, with uncanny accuracy. One of the deepest pieces of James Gray lore I’m aware of is that a colleague of his got him to post-sync some of Sean Connery’s dialogue in Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), although it was a temp track that didn’t end up in the final edit.

Asked if he would ever make a true comedy, Gray has said he would love to; if he had a story idea for one, he “would do it in a second.” But until that seemingly unlikely day, we have Two Lovers, which I would never actually call a comedy except playfully to hint at certain interesting qualities it has. If it doesn’t play like a romantic comedy, it is at least structured like one, the same archetypal love triangle premise except treated absolutely seriously. It’s also a comedy in a more classical, Shakespearean sense, where a comedy wasn’t defined merely by the presence of humor but by an ending where all the play’s characters are matched up romantically, maritally, often by deus ex machina intervention in the plot. The same happens in Two Lovers, where at the last minute Paltrow retreats to Koteas’ Ronald  Blatt(—a top tier character name, that) and Phoenix falls into the arms of Shaw in an “all’s well that ends well” type situation, even if the feelings associated with that phrase are almost entirely drowned in a healthy dose of tragedy, sadness, or (the best I can do) bittersweetness. The film is full of comic situations, except they’re played in such a sincere and loving register that scenes are serious even when their set-up isn’t—c.f. the scene with Phoenix hiding behind the door as Koteas unexpectedly intrudes on him and the sick Paltrow, which is like a classic set-up out of Vaudeville, but in the context of Paltrow’s miscarriage there’s no opportunity for laughter. Phoenix’s character is supposed to be a bit clownish and awkward, but he’s never a figure that one laughs at (or at least one shouldn’t—that would betray the film’s stance of pure empathy.) Gray had not wanted him to be a straight up nerd, but rather someone with the pathos of someone who used to be quite appealing. Partially based on someone Gray knew, his backstory was to be that of someone who had in a way lost his swagger, ruined by heartbreak and stuck in a kind of arrested development.[9] Damaged but far from completely gone, he says he used to have a crew, and his rap in the car with the girls and then his spontaneous breakdancing at the club prove that he still retains some of his awkward charm. There’s a pathos there, of a story arc that begins long before the confines of the film’s narrative (his teenage-like bedroom hints at it: posters, a boombox, etc.), which is an essential part of the film’s accumulated historical—nay, cosmic—weight.

The fact that Leonard lives with his parents (back, again, after the tragic dissolution of his previous engagement) is no small thing. Everything to do with them—living with them, working in their dry-cleaning shop, interacting with their social circle—reminds us of the weight of social expectations, cultural and familial, which for the sake of ease can be summed up in one very familiar word: class. Or fate, which we’ve already determined is pretty much the same thing in Gray’s world, since you can’t choose what family you’re born into. (And I now recall that we switched up the idea to family = class in last week’s piece on We Own the Night; funny how that all works....) Much of Two Lovers’ plot is dictated, explicitly or implicitly, by parents: it was Leonard’s previous fiancée’s parents that forced them to break up, it’s his own parents that encourage his meeting and courting of Sandra, just as Sandra’s parents do the same—the scene of Leonard lying straight to Sandra’s father’s face, ring for Paltrow in hand, that he’s going to continue in the dry-cleaning business, is quietly maybe the film’s most trenchant scene about all of this. All of the parents in Gray films up to this point seem to have this same desire, that their children not throw their lives away on their actual dreams and instead either rise in status through their work or remain comfortably ensconced in the reliable work they have. “Leo’s mother,” writes Robert Alpert about The Yards, “no less than Gray’s fathers, has been corrupted by the demands of commerce. Her dream is that Leo should rise above his working class status.” We add some letters and from Leo we get Leonard, and almost a decade later the dream is no longer to rise above but that the son become content with his current class position. (Simultaneously a drop in ambition, perhaps tragic, and a maturation in terms of reality, perhaps a good thing—it’s complicated.) But each parental position, at least in these two films, still comes from a place of great love, wanting what appears best for their son. Indeed, the mother/son connection in Two Lovers echoes that in The Yards, just as Isabella Rossellini echoes Ellyn Burstyn when she says her son looks handsome in a suit. But Two Lovers explores a parent-child relation that The Yards hadn’t touched on, which is the parental influence—interference?—on the son’s relationships, his marriage “prospects.” The very fact that Leonard’s parents are so clearly encouraging of his relationship with Sandra is fuel for his reluctance in working on it relative to his pursuit of Michelle (and notice how the moments of “progress” with Sandra almost exclusively come after moments of setback with Michelle, almost as a kind of revenge on her.) But the movie never, ever tries to say that choosing Sandra is “settling”; in the world of the film, Gray clearly shows her as a real catch, parental backing or not. Leonard’s reluctance to be attracted to Sandra has much to do with class reasons—he can’t see her loveliness because of what she’s associated with: home, family, class. And yet notice how the most positive moments in the film happen indoors, in the home. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve referenced Gray saying this, but I’ll quote him again here on how in the family “there is the capacity for destruction and”—also—"the capacity for great nurturing.” It’s the Grayian dialectic, par excellence.

Contra Sandra’s associations, Paltrow as Michelle descends from above—literally, as she lives above Leonard in the same apartment complex—as the answer to everything Leonard desires but, culturally, socially, isn’t supposed to get.[10] His friendship with Michelle gets him into places he wouldn’t usually be—the club[11], the fancy restaurant—and gives him a glimpse at a life, as unrealistic as it may be, away from everything that he finds so stifling about the one he has. The way Gray films his entrance into Manhattan to meet Paltrow and Koteas for dinner is an explicit break with the style of the rest of the film—a decade before Ad Astra, it’s shot like he’s flying to mars. This sense of an otherworldly atmosphere is taken from Gray himself, the Queens-bred boy going into the big city that, seen from his childhood window, seemed as far away as a neighboring planet. Scored to Henry Mancini’s spacey “Lujon” from the late 1950s television adventure drama Mr. Lucky, the moment embodies Gray’s memories of entering Manhattan feeling “like going into Oz....” The oddness, and the fish-out-of-water class undertones, are continually emphasized when Phoenix makes it to the restaurant. Clearly out of his element trying to act like this is nothing new for him when speaking to the maître d’,[12] he’s then seated under an abstract sculpture in maybe the funniest shot of Gray’s career. Ordering the drink he’s previously been told by Paltrow as the drink they get there, he tries to hide his embarrassment at being asked if he wants a straw in place of his stirring stick. If the class aspect all seems a bit too emphasized (it doesn’t), then chalk it up to Gray’s vision of Manhattan as “part Midnight Cowboy and part My Man Godfrey”—with nothing in the middle. As Ronald[13] and Michelle depart to see an actual opera, Leonard is stuck with his cheap CD of operatic highlights that he puts on when he gets home. That his desire for Michelle is tied up with class becomes more obvious when Gray reminds us that Vertigo, a key text for him, is also very much about class: Jimmy Stewart, noticing a working girl that looks similar to the dead Judy, has to literally make Kim Novak over into the upper-class version of herself before he can truly “love” her.

 

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Before shooting Two Lovers, James Gray handed Joaquin Phoenix a poem and said to him—“that’s what the movie is about.” The poem was Louis Aragon’s “Contre-chant,” originally from his 1963 book Le Fou d’Elsa, but which Gray first encountered in a 1965 lecture by Jacques Lacan entitled “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours.” Here’s the English translation of the poem.

In vain your image comes to meet me

And does not enter me where I am who only shows it

Turning towards me you can find

On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors

That can reflect but cannot see

Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited

By your absence which makes them blind.

Gray discussed it with Phoenix, saying that it meant “that what we love—we think we love—is simply a projection of what we ourselves lack in us,” and how love—really, desire—is “all based on projection.” Leonard’s intense pursuit of Michelle is, if you think about it, absurd; he’s chasing after someone he barely knows, and continues to chase after her even after she repeatedly tells him that he doesn’t know her. For Gray, “the idea being that what Joaquin thinks he loves is essentially a creation of his own making.” In the sobriety of analysis it’s easy to label such a pursuit, such an act of projection, as absurd. But we’ve all been there, and in the moment all logic and perspective fly out the window and are so thoroughly replaced by yearnings, longings, desires, irrational as they may be. Even if we tell ourselves, under reason’s momentary sway, that what we are doing is not in our best interests, that by no means guarantees that we will take our own advice—recall the earlier extract from Notes from the Underground, where we see just how human it is to do exactly this. Being in love—which, again, is often just being in a state of desire—is absurd, preposterous, a state of delirium. But only from the outside—to the person under its spell, there is nothing more real. But in the intense subjective reality of such a feeling the feelings of the one desired—the autonomous existence of them—is easily forgotten. In love with our own projection of who the other person is, we forget to love the actual person. Real, selfless love is replaced by desire; or worse, lust.

Leonard’s pursuit of Michelle is far from the innocence of a schoolboy crush—in fact, he says just as much (“this isn’t just some stupid fucking crush!”) right before what’s maybe the darkest moment in the film, where he takes advantage of Michelle in a moment of vulnerability for the advantage of his own sexual desires. It’s “not quite” rape, but let’s be honest—it kind of is. I’m not going to get lost in semantics over it, but the technical absence of an out-loud “no” and Michelle’s apparent confirmation of her contentment with the event in the next scene hardly wipes away what, in the moment, was the kind of thing that gets lost in the statistical gray area when talking about sexual misconduct, but is no less potentially damaging for it. When Michelle reveals herself in her window across the courtyard from Leonard (the fulfillment of his voyeuristic moments earlier in the film), it’s telling: it’s her left breast that is revealed, where her heart is—but it’s only flesh, and Leonard’s giddiness betrays the fact that he’s mistaken a kind of physical consent to their relationship as a well-rounded emotional, mental, or spiritual consent that is and will remain lacking.[14]

But to go back up to the rooftop scene for a moment, and add another hint of darkness to it, the way Phoenix aggressively twists his voice and spits his confession out of the side of his mouth—that he loves her—reminds me of the way Phoenix acts his confession scene at the end of Gray’s next film The Immigrant (a character ostensibly more “villainous”): raw, uninhibited, and coming from a place of pure self-hatred, simultaneously a place of admitted evil and a place of sadness. “I’m fucked up too!” Leonard tells Michelle, and it’s in our recognition of Leonard as a human being with massive problems that we each see ourselves, in one way or another—and its why, even when he borderline rapes Michelle, not for a second do we ever lose our intimate empathetic connection with him. So the scene damns us as much as it damns him, but in a way that brings everyone involved, characters and viewers, into a dark whirlpool of ragged, messy, confrontational emotions, the mutual recognition of sin-fueled hearts paradoxically causing an outpouring of love—a love that has been stripped of its self-righteous pretenses, and therefore one capable of loving more truly, more selflessly.

This sort of reading—of the film revealing its characters’ imperfectness and then, instantaneously, immediately, embracing them via love—makes sense to me, given that it feels like Gray’s most personal film he had made up to that point. A film that shows the simultaneously self-critical and self-loving nature of being a human being in the world. That is, a film that shows the simultaneously self-critical and self-loving nature of being James Gray. Gray plumbs the depths of himself and—with just enough of an artistic veneer to avoid all eyes on him—puts everything inside of him on the screen, body spirit and soul. I’ve said before that I think we often underestimate just how personal, how nakedly intimate, certain films and filmmakers are; James Gray’s Two Lovers is one of those films. But it’s not personal in the narrow, conventional way we think about that idea; that is to say, it’s not autobiographical. At least nowhere near as autobiographical as Gray’s first three films were. But the arc of James Gray’s career, as we will continue to see, is one long demonstration of the fact that autobiographical doesn’t necessarily mean personal and personal doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical. If Gray has been sliding across the pendulum for the time it’s taken him to make his first seven movies, Two Lovers finds him at the mid-point of his slide away from autobiographical towards the purely personal. In this sense the film is a great artistic leap—which, given how accomplished his previous films are, is quite the thing to say.

 

Strangely, I never thought of myself as a director of crime films. I had stories inside of me to tell, and the shape of the film noir suited them, no doubt because they were fundamentally tragic. A crime film, a thriller, it carries with it a good dose of tragedy. At the beginning of my career, I used genre as a protection. My films were fundamentally very personal—Little Odessa tells of the death of my mother, The Yards and We Own the Night the relationships of father and son and between brothers... And, of course, I have a brother. So, wrapping the story in the envelope of a specific genre, with its obligatory passages, the murders, the chases, the arrests, it was a way of exposing myself less. With age and experience, I’ve gained a new confidence. I’m throwing myself into films closer to those I love like Fellini’s La strada or The Nights of Cabiria, films where there is a mixture of tones.

The goal behind the movie was to treat love as a subject worthy of serious treatment. I don’t mean that the film is dour. There are moments of humor. But I felt that there should be no walls between the character, the actor and the audience. In other words, there should be no irony; you are invited by the movie to be totally empathetic with the people in it. We would never talk down to or be condescending to them. All this went into the thinking.

I used to be much more particular, making paintings and showing specific scenes from movies. But I’ve tried to free myself from that, particularly on this film. I didn’t talk with Joaquin [Baca-Asay] very much. I’d play him a piece of music or I’d play him a scene from a film. Not as something to steal but as something that gives a sense of mood. I might also show him a painting or a photograph, to find in each scene one point of commonality, because the thing that matters most to me is the feel and mood. Almost always, Joaquin gave me something better than what I had in mind. I think it’s an exercise in futility to try and get your vision on the screen, because it’s never going to happen. The only thing that you can do is try to make sure the film looks beautiful, better than you had imagined, as it slips away from you. It’s very hard to do, actually.

It did represent a—I don’t know how to sound unpretentious, so I’ll just sound pretentious saying this—a philosophical change in my approach to the material, to the movie. I always loved movies that were not ironic, but this was the first time I remember thinking consciously that I wanted to remove any barrier between us and the story, us and the people in it, the barrier between actor and character, and director and the audience, the extension of our sympathies. I remembered thinking... this was the first movie where I felt that that was everything. And in a philosophical way, that was different. I always believed that, but I remember thinking that’s the point of this, to be so sincere as to be uncomfortable. You know, that there would be nothing that would be like, I’m smarter than the people in the movie, look at that schmuck. I kinda hate that, in art. Not just in movies, but in art.

It was in some way a kind of—an attempt by me to reinvent how I thought about the cinema.

 

Listening to Gray talk about his personal evolution around the time of Two Lovers, if you really listen, is quite moving. For the filmmaker who started off as a hot shot 23 year old with a lucky start, ready to make the world’s greatest masterpiece, to see him years later sit back and approach a movie with little more than a humble ambition to be as true to himself as possible, and to erase all distance between filmmaker – film – audience... well, it’s quite something. A reinvention, a philosophical change; no hiding behind the middle man of genre, the removal of anything that could be perceived as hackneyed; and very little recourse to other movies—as Gray says, “I started to forget about other movies, and I tried to look inside.” From the autobiographical—his own life and that of the movies he loved—to the personal.[15] Or, could we say, from outer world to inner life? Not that inner life had been absent in his films—far from it—but having been in the movies for over a dozen years at that point, one can imagine that the insertion of inner life, without a re-catalyzing change, could become automatic, pre-determined, lifeless. Gray felt this: “To be honest, I tried with this film to interrupt something in my filmography that I found too uniform: the tone was a bit too much the same....”

There is a visible maturing. From cops and crime to melodrama and myth—in Two Lovers, the roof, the beach, the water—it’s palpably cosmic. Gray shows us the World. One French interviewer on the Two Lovers press circuit even notes this maturation parallel to Gray’s aging appearance as he approached his 40s: “There is a weariness in his voice, considerably less enthusiasm. Physically, it’s clear: in places he’s starting to look like a professor of literature from Princeton. One word comes back to his mouth, which he chews and re-chews over the course of the conversation: 'maturity.' Maturity and emotion."

Two Lovers also marks the first time Gray officially had final cut.[16] The conceptual, philosophical maturation finds its embodiment in the form, which quietly reaches a never-before-reached casual beauty in Gray—no ostentatiousness, just shots and cuts, and somehow the images lie on a mythic plane just a step higher than the already clear formal mastery in the previous three films. (Perhaps that’s it—the mastery is so casual that it no longer registers as mastery....)[17] Gray’s editor John Axelrad—who he had met as a student at USC and started working with on We Own the Night (Jeff Ford, editor on The Yards, recommended him)—cites the “quiet intensity” of Gray’s edits. On his films, Gray is there with the editor(s) the whole time the cutting is being done; he prefers to edit linearly, scene by scene, perfecting it and then moving on.[18]

If Two Lovers is an artistic breakthrough, one which sees the autobiographical Gray disappear behind even deeper personal concerns, it’s ironically also the movie which comes closest to being Gray’s self-portrait. (Just because there’s a move away from autobiography doesn’t mean it will ever be fully abandoned....) Phoenix is, by all accounts and by a number of pieces of on-screen evidence, playing a version of Gray himself, even imitating him at times. The class clown grown up, never exactly a big hit with the ladies, lover of DVDs (c.f. the 2001: A Space Odyssey poster on the wall of Leonard’s room), and someone who has “some measure of artistic dream”—for Leonard photography, for Gray cinema. As Ethan Vestby writes, “knowing Gray’s public persona (just watch any of his Q & A appearances) as someone somehow simultaneously serious about his work and wholly comic regarding everything else, it even becomes easy to read Leonard as his clearest stand-in of a lead: the goofball artist who, above all, is a deeply earnest romantic.” The scene of Phoenix rapping in the car—taken by some at the time as connected to his post-film publicity antics—was really something that came straight from Gray, something he and his friends used to do when they were young.

I’m not the characters that Joaquin has played in my last three films, but there are of course enormous aspects of my own personality and my own life in there. I’ve had those feelings of fixation and worship in my own life. I wasn’t an outcast or anything when I was a teenager—I was more the class clown—but I didn’t exactly hit with the ladies, either. And when you’re vulnerable like that, the person who you fix yourself on seems like everything to you. We don’t love people, we love the image we make of them—we make them the perfection that we don’t have in our own lives. And when they don’t live up to that image, or when they take themselves away from us, well, that’s it: we’ve lost everything. We haven’t, of course, but we feel that way even if we know it’s not true intellectually.

If Gray finally felt like exploring this particular vulnerability at this point in time, I have to image it had something to do with the newfound solidity in his life that came with getting married. Having met her at a party where he was being set up with someone else, Gray married Alexandra Dickson in 2005. Now Alexandra Dickson Gray, she is a documentarian with two co-director credits to her name on IMDb, among other miscellaneous work from the mid-90s to today.[19] The script of Two Lovers was written just months before their wedding date. From conception to completion, for Gray, was he says the happiest time of his life, due to his marriage; it might seem odd, then, that Two Lovers is the film that came out of this time of joy. But I’d propose that it was just that contentment that allowed him to, almost purge the particular feelings presented in Two Lovers, a kind of cathartic creation that could only be embarked upon after securing some kind of comfort in regards to his own personal romantic life. As tragic as the film is, relative to his previous work it’s the most optimistic film he had made to date, depending on how you read the ending; starting from an ending of pure tragedy with Little Odessa, coming to an ending of slightly less tragedy with The Yards (the protagonist lives, for what it’s worth), and reaching with We Own the Night an ending of tragedy yet this time mixed with at least a tincture of good, with Two Lovers Gray finally reached an ending that I think can be reasonably called bittersweet, even if there could be more emphasis on the bitter side depending on the viewer. (This pattern will continue, and quite movingly so....)

But whatever way you look at it, Two Lovers definitely finds Gray in a place of more maturity, a place where he can look at himself in the mirror and reflect with more clarity about his emotions. As he puts it, he “was trying to break down the wall between myself and the work.” If Leonard is a version of Gray, then it’s a version that comes out of Gray’s reflections on himself, his past and present and future; one way to look at it is that Gray could have been Leonard, but wasn’t. I find the parallel artistic ambition to be of more significance than it may at first seem: Leonard’s love of photography—a hobby, something that he’d like to pursue, but which he really can’t or doesn’t—is like the image of Gray if he hadn’t been able to pursue filmmaking. It’s like a potential vision of who Gray could have turned out to be if his parents had succeeded in discouraging him from going into movies. Gray has said that Two Lovers is “about uncertainty and being embarrassed of your background”; that background maybe being working class and parents who wanted him to have a “good job” (i.e. make money) instead of pursuing his artistic passions, where there were no great riches to be had. And it’s not like he believes his parents monsters for desiring that for him; telling him that he wouldn’t make it was also a way of protecting him against himself if he failed. But he didn’t... he didn’t, and it’s a happy irony that the photographs taken by Leonard in the film—which may or may not “amount” to anything, societally speaking—were taken by Gray’s wife herself, a marriage of two practicing artists, in Gray’s fourth feature film, in the middle of a career that for all its obstacles has shown no sign of slowing down in the decade-plus since. We get merely a hint of the real depths of the hidden family drama in Gray’s childhood household, as well as the way it find itself reflected in Two Lovers, in a 2008 interview at the Forum des Images in Paris:

That even though Gwyneth is screwed up and all of that, she was good for him in one key respect, and the fact that he doesn’t get to go with her is... kind of horrible. And he’ll be in that dry cleaners the rest of his life. Which I think is really sad. But it was a reality that I understood, and my parents did the same thing to my brother. So, I don’t know, it was just something that hit me very personally and... I’m not Leonard, I made it out. I don’t know why....

The transcription cannot come close to conveying just how memory-filled and emotion-filled those last couples lines are; watch here beginning around the 1:01:00 mark to witness it for yourself. There’s a whole world hidden in the way he looks and sounds when remarking on the final difference between himself and Leonard, and though just a blip in the air in that interview, it’s moving, and makes thinking about the film itself more moving for it.

But what Gray also gets at here is the ending, a two-headed beast of an ending, which since we’ve finally reached the point of talking about it explicitly I’ll preface by saying this: part of me just wants to throw up my hands and let it be, knowing that nothing I say will come within a thousand miles of the complexity and ambiguity it contains. Having said that....

Like the last half hour of Little Odessa, Two Lovers takes on an implicitly mythic, dreamlike tone immediately after the climactic rooftop scene. From there the momentum of desire and of escape takes us straight to the end; so when we, along with Leonard, hit the brick wall of Michelle’s change of mind, time stops, and we are left adrift with nothing else to hold onto than the immediacy of Leonard’s emotions as he stumbles on the abandoned Brighton Beach boardwalk and down to the beach, to the sea. Suspended in a state of emotional hyper-awareness, every small movement of Joaquin Phoenix, every gesture, every micro-shift on his face—this, for the moment, is our world. There is nothing before or after the sounds and images immediately before us on screen. I’ve seen Two Lovers seven times and no sequence in any other movie holds me under its spell like this one has every single time. In fact, I’ve probably never actually seen this scene in its entirety, every moment of it, because it can be hard to see through tears sometimes. When Joaquin Phoenix breaks into tears—it’s just too much. Gray understands this: “Scenes where emotion arrives head-on usually put the viewer in a very uncomfortable position. As if there was no distance between what the character is experiencing and what the viewer may have (or has) experienced.” No distance. What’s the opposite of distance? One answer could be intimacy, but there’s another answer that’s still less distance: oneness. In this moment, I am he and he is me—not in a “he’s literally me” kind of way, not to suggest that the experiences presented on screen are similar or the same to my own lived experiences, but in a oneness of pure empathy—what he feels I feel, what he is I am, because Love, formed between real viewer and fictional character, has resulted in a relationship of infinite care. That this has happened between myself and a film, a movie, might seem a bit silly; less so when one realizes the short leap from movie to reality. As people will sometimes say, “watching movies can’t make you a better person”—true, except is that the movie’s fault or our own? To re-enter the world after a film like Two Lovers, and to encounter another human being with less than full empathy and love, is to betray the film—and oh, how often we’ve been guilty of that....

And yet so few films reach this point where I find myself talking about betraying them; there’s something rare about Two Lovers in just how much it gives itself to you. Maybe it’s because Gray treats his subject, this “loser” who works at his parent’s dry cleaning shop, with a Lean-esque grandeur, whose emotions are so thoroughly validated and embraced with an early Fellini level of empathy—"All of [whose] movies,” remarks Gray, “say the same thing: that we are ridiculous, that we are idiots, but we never ever ever ever talk down to each other, that we all realize that we’re idiots together.” Phoenix on the beach is straight out of La strada, Anthony Quinn kneeling on the sand staring at the heavens and mourning his life and the world. As Phoenix wades into the waters at the end of the film we encounter a variation on his drowning attempt at the beginning of it; still despondent, if for new reasons, yet the difference is essential: this time he doesn’t choose to throw himself into the water. And by the waves of fate washing up the glove that just fell out of his pocket, we slowly register the budding of a new sensation: hope.

As he makes his way back to the source of those gifted gloves, retrieving the ring he had previously tossed away, for maybe the first time in Gray’s filmography it feels less like a character is on the carousel of fate and more like—maybe, just maybe—he has made a willful decision. Even if one reads it as once again fate-based, it’s clearly a fate kinder than the ones doled out to Gray’s previous protagonists; considering the role of the waves in reminding Leonard of his other option, it’s almost like fate is—at least a little bit—on his side (or at least bashfully attempting to reconcile after dashing his previous hopes and dreams the moment before). When Leonard makes his way back to Sandra and completely gives himself over to her in a pieta embrace to end the film, one is not just struck by his near-total despondency but just as much by the loving presence of Sandra in the picture—if you don’t count the half-way-thereness of Mark Wahlberg’s fraternal presence at the end of We Own the Night, the first time a James Gray film has ended with the protagonist not alone. Yet as an ending it’s aggressively ambiguous; as literal and easy to understand as it is on the surface, the implications are multitudinous. Is it a tragic ending or, ultimately, a happy one? That both readings are valid is proof that Gray finally succeeded after forever searching after the ending of Nights of Cabiria[20] for his own moment of supreme dialectics—that is, a moment with the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in its head at the same time, what some people call the sign of genius. Both readings hold so much weight; both competing emotions exist simultaneously in the most concrete way. Far be it from me to choose which I give more weight to, but on an entirely personal note, the older I get the more I read it as more of a happy ending than a tragic one—18-year-old me may not have agreed, but the beauty of it is that even amidst shifting feelings, I’ve never been wrong.[21] Given that the existence of Sandra’s character is absent from the film’s inspirational material White Nights, the cutting and yet hopeful ending of that story—“My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?”—hardly applies here except in an oblique way. Gray does Dostoevsky one better and, instead of leaving his protagonist alone and memory-filled for the rest of his days, offers him a kind of consolation prize that is also much more than that—perhaps a bigger prize than his original desire, if only he is able to eventually realize it. Sadness is always mixed with hope just as hope is always mixed with sadness; that’s the paradox of life. So it’s appropriate that the film ends on New Year’s Eve, signifying something new, whatever it may be, amidst the bittersweet mixture of anticipation and uncertainty that always accompanies the holiday.

However you name the emotion that accompanies the close of Two Lovers, it’s an emotion that I don’t think any other film has ever specifically evoked (the closest two competitors: Nights of Cabiria and Chaplin’s City Lights). One common criticism of Gray as a filmmaker is that he has no original ideas, ideas of his own. But if the implicit Grayian idea is that the emotions are the ideas, then I certainly can’t claim to have experienced the specific emotions I experience here in any other film, thereby making them original emotions, or, by the transitive property, original ideas. But if I had to choose the central emotion-idea of Two Lovers as a whole, from a suggestion by Gray himself, I would choose one word: loneliness. Two Lovers is really just one big cathartic ode to the inherent human existential state of loneliness. Gray:

At its core, I think Two Lovers is not really a love story. I think it’s about this young man dealing with loneliness. Anyways, this was what I was trying to express, and what made the film very personal for me. You know, the idea that you wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning and you realize—you’re all alone in the world.

Perhaps that is the most terrible thing about being human... As a child, I had a hard time falling asleep. I remember the terror I felt when my parents turned out the lights and stopped talking. When they finally went to bed, I felt like I was sinking into an endless abyss.... Every effort of ours to make friends, to get married, to join a club, gang, or anything else, is just there to push away this terrifying idea that we are alone. There’s no one. I am the world and the world is me.

If Two Lovers is really more of a loneliness story than a love story, then another little line from Gray could have been used as the poster tagline: “We always fall in love with the wrong people.” And if the essential aloneness of human existence is the heart of the film’s emotional thematic, then the heart of the film’s emotional catharsis is the collective audience appreciation of that fact—which, paradoxically, unites us in our loneliness, and therefore makes us not alone. From a lesser film, “we are not alone in our struggles in the world” would sound like a trite message to leave with. As it is, I feel a little embarrassed suggesting it as the main cathartic takeaway of Two Lovers, so thoroughly does it rub me as unforgivably cliché. But I don’t even really think that the film is “saying” that—it doesn’t ever go that far. It’s simply that one feels that one can go that far, after it, so intensely and honestly does the film relay its main idea of man’s loneliness. And in this we see how the sheer simplicity of the James Gray project can result in something so, so immense:

I want to say, “This is the way the world is...” Simply to say it like it is. And somehow, if you do that, it becomes cathartic.

 

__

 

In a release of great irony, Two Lovers opened theatrically in America on February 13, 2009, Valentine’s Day weekend. As far as I can tell the film was originally set to open in time for Oscar season at the end of 2008, but was pushed back into 2009 after the money people got a look at it—to get it made, Gray had probably oversold the romance angle (just look at one hilariously bad poster the film was given, which sells it as a kind of sexy romance), and of course those in control of advertising probably had a nightmare when they saw what kind of film it actually was. It barely made any money, but the American critical establishment finally—finally, picking up the long-offered torch from the French—came around on Gray and offered decent critical support for the film, and have been more or less supportive of Gray ever since. Not helping matters commercially was the fact that Joaquin Phoenix was at the time in the middle of a gigantic publicity stunt / performance art piece that distracted from the film’s rollout—it’s easy to forget that on the night of his infamous, cagy appearance on David Letterman’s show, he was ostensibly there to promote Two Lovers. Having announced his retirement from acting in order to focus on becoming a professional rapper, nobody knew what was going on with him. The results of this stunt are preserved for us in (Phoenix’s brother-in-law at the time) Casey Affleck’s film I’m Still Here (2010)—which is honestly a very interesting movie, funny and uncomfortable and trenchant, about fame and privacy and the man behind the actor (and the actor behind the man) that is Joaquin Phoenix. After embarking on this stunt, Pheonix did eventually tell Gray that it was a hoax—it’s hard to tell if Gray’s confused answers to questions about Phoenix in interviews for Two Lovers are genuine or if he’s feigning ignorance for Phoenix’s sake, but by all accounts it seems like Gray eventually became a reluctant participant in the charade. Gray was shown a three-hour cut of Affleck’s movie to give comments on and is thanked in the credits for the movie—a small gesture of appreciation, perhaps, for apparently having damaged much of Two Lovers’ chance at getting fair press, although who’s to say if the stunt didn’t paradoxically bring greater attention to the film than it otherwise would have gotten.

---

[1] Gray: “I have a feeling that’s why straight-up tragedies in movies don’t really work commercially. I think it’s because it’s too close to us. You read a great, monumental novel like Anna Karenina or Moby Dick. They wander a lot. There’s a level of distance you have from the book, right? You can put it down. With a movie, it’s like a bullet. You can’t really wander. And you are so invested in such a primal way that it’s hard to accept something so disastrous.”

[2] A film which Gray loves, by the way. One of his film school classmates relates this great anecdote:

I remember talking to Gray only once, when he visited the set of the film I crewed on that semester, Joel Was Here. Godfather III had been recently released, and most critics had trashed it. Going against the prevailing opinion, Gray told me he had been moved to tears by the ending of Coppola’s film and did not understand how anyone could not be similarly affected. I had been unfortunate enough to have seen the film when it opened, Christmas Day, but declined to express my opinion. I’m not entirely sure how this conversation arose, but I’m pretty sure that Gray, seeing me fiddling with my sound boom with little else to do while the DP set up the next shot, just started talking to me about the film out of the blue.

[3] And maybe a jot of 1960s Fellini, as Gray claims the distant sound of kettle drums in the film’s opening scene was inspired by 8½ (1963); though I’d have to rewatch it to figure out what the specifics of this inspiration are, exactly.

[4] Please don’t take this quick gloss of neorealism for anything approaching a properly nuanced understanding of its complex historical existence. I once again point you towards Tag Gallagher’s The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini: His Life and Films (1998), particularly the two chapters on neorealism, for what is probably most accurate account of what post-war neorealism was actually all about. (Available for free in PDF form.)

[5] A few months after I wrote this, I discovered that Joe Swanberg included Two Lovers on his top ten list for the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. (Vindication!)

[6] Speaking of My Darling Clementine (1946), Gray says that “If I ever make a movie that has one nine-hundredth the longing, the kind of profound emotional commitment that Henry Fonda walking to church as, I’ll be a happy guy.”

[7] And we sometimes forget the existence of an at least one man Cahiers faction—Rohmer—that subtly pushed back against the main tendency of form over content criticism with this idea: that subject matter matters.

[8] Another thing we forget: that even “non-narrative” films all have a story. Even the most abstract avant-garde film, given the fact that it moves through time from point A to point B, has a story.

[9] Additionally to the person Gray knew, Gray reveals that the film is also, perhaps subconsciously, about his writing partner Ric Menello: “You know, in some ways, without me knowing it consciously—because I did the first draft of Two Lovers on my own—Two Lovers is sort of about him. When I went into his apartment—I’ll never forget this—in Cheesequake Village, there was a photograph of a very handsome man in a tuxedo, and I said, “Oh, who’s that?” and he said, “Me.” And it was a picture, I guess, from the early to mid-seventies, and Menello had a bit of a dashing quality. And I remember thinking, “Oh, Menello had this relationship with this woman and he was supposed to marry…” and there was this other woman, and he was, at one point, sort of dashing, but at the same time he had these problems, where he was living with his mother, he wouldn’t leave the apartment. And then, all of a sudden, the next thing I know I’m writing a whole script about it. And in some ways, that’s his story. He wasn’t a handsome guy like Joaquin Phoenix, but the truth of the matter is that, in his day, he was.”

[10] Although Michelle’s class status is more by association with Ronald than actual, as a hint is dropped that her father was once wealthy but then flushed it all away (c.f. Percy Fawcett’s father in The Lost City of Z).

[11] The club scene, here as in The Yards a scene of absolute electricity and heightened emotions, is magnificent, set to Moby’s “I Love to Move in Here,” the most up-to-the-minute popular club song Gray could find. Ironically, after being criticized on We Own the Night for using Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”—from 1978—in his late-'80s set movie, he had walked into The Box in NYC, a hip place at the time, and they were playing that exact song. Again inspired by the club scene in the beginning of I Am Cuba like The Yards’ scene was, Phoenix goes all out on the dancefloor—he had apparently been inspired by a move he saw when in Toronto for TIFF done by Harmony Korine, a kind of pop-and-lock move that the “chicks dug.” Gray was operating the handheld camera on the scene and they got it all in one take.

[12] The maître d’ is played by Doug Wright, a playwright Gray had met doing a Sundance lab, and who also wrote the Joaquin Phoenix-starring movie Quills (2000).

[13] The way Koteas plays Blatt, which we’re given our best peak at in the restaurant scene, is picture perfect: a bit of a creep, his performance comes off as a toned down version of his performance in David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996).

[14] I hesitate to include this note because I’m not interested in using it in the way one could imagine it being used; but I want to include it because it gets at something messy and human and dark about not just the film but the making of the film, and therefore the making of all films; something about how when an actor is asked to put their entire being into a film, the whole range of desires and emotions, then of course if they do—since actors are human—they are going to also put in stuff that is not so pleasant. Here’s the relevant anecdote from Gray: “I was shooting Two Lovers and there’s a scene where he’s talking to Gwyneth across the courtyard on the phone. I’m shooting his close-up and I was operating camera on the shot. And I was looking through the lens, and he’s terrific in this scene, all of a sudden, it was of his profile as he looks out the window, and I see him—his head starts going like this [back-and-forth head motion]. So I thought what the hell is he doing, why is his head doing like that. So I kinda went like this, moved my head away from the camera to look at his whole body, and he was masturbating. Well I can’t use that, because it’s funny, it’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable—not in a good way—it’s bad; but I loved it. Because it said that he was willing to do anything. He was willing to be totally vulnerable. And I loved him for it. Even though it wasn’t usable.”

[15] C.f. Michelangelo Antonioni in 1955: “The greatest effort is to make films which have some meaning in one’s personal life without straying into the confessional.”

[16] It may have appeared like Gray had final cut on We Own the Night, but this was mostly a case of him having good producers; a few things were changed (for example, Vadim saying “he’s a dead man” after learning of Phoenix’s heritage wasn’t wanted by Gray, but they made him put it in). As Gray says: “I had producers who, frankly, were wonderful and listened to reason, and there are some changes I had to make for them, but nothing I felt that hurt the film. There were a couple of things I removed, a couple of short scenes that I removed for them, that I think would have made the film a little bit better and richer, but that happens to every movie almost.”

[17] Fascinatingly, when I rewatched the films for the purpose of taking screenshots, I noticed that with Two Lovers I was taking considerably less of them than with the previous films. Less beauty for beauty’s sake, perhaps, or simply a secretly great application of Bresson’s dictum: “Not beautiful images, not beautiful photography, but necessary images and photography.”

[18] On Two Lovers, Gray and Axelrod cut out three scenes involving a subplot with Leonard and his bookie (which can be seen as special features on the DVD release). The importance of narrative for Gray’s cutting policies is clear—editing linearly, he leaves nothing that doesn’t fit.

[19] Perhaps insignificant, but Dickson Gray does slightly resemble Gwyneth Paltrow.

[20] A film which often pops up as Gray’s pick for his all-time favorite movie. In a 2009 issue of Newsweek he presented these as his top five: 1) Nights of Cabiria (1957), 2) The Leopard (1963), 3) Vertigo (1958), 4) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 5) Ran (1985).

[21] On How to Recover from Sentimental Disappointment: the ending can absolutely be read as one chooses, so if I choose to see it a certain way—for example, as the way Providence knocks you down, humbles you, by denying you your greatest desire (—for your own good!) and then subtly points you toward something else, maybe something less flashy, maybe something more wholesome—then, well, I can choose to see it that way.