Two Lovers
US/France 2008
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow
Director: James Gray
Surveillance
US/Germany 2008
Starring: Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond
Director: Jennifer Lynch
Wendy and Lucy
US 2008
Starring: Michelle Williams, Wally Dalton
Director: Kelly Reichardt
The Young Victoria
UK/US 2009
Starring: Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee
WHEN Two Lovers premiered in competition at Cannes last May, writer-director James Gray became, after Joel Coen, only the second American this decade to compete for the Palme d’Or in consecutive years. The 2007 festival hosted We Own The Night, a cop/family drama that went on to become one of that year’s most accomplished – and most inexplicably under-appreciated – multiplex releases.
Both Two Lovers and We Own The Night are set in bleakly atmospheric backwaters of New York City, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man facing a painful dilemma. In We Own the Night, the choice was between the excitement of a shady nightclub management career and the dutiful path of following his father and brother into the police force. This time, the problem is, as the title suggests, more romantic in nature. However, posters for the film showing Phoenix’s Leonard as a debonair lothario, torn between the charms of a blonde (Gwyneth Paltrow) and a brunette (Vinessa Shaw), give a misleading impression of the film’s tone and content.
Taking its wintry ambience from the Brighton Beach locations in which it was shot – home to the city’s Russian and Ukrainian communities, including Gray’s own family – Two Lovers is a bracingly downbeat, sombre affair. Struggling to cope with bipolar disorder, Leonard – a talented amateur photographer who works at his dad’s dry-cleaning business – finds himself, in his mid-30s, still living with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov.) He quickly becomes besotted with his new neighbour, party girl Michelle (Paltrow), even though she has a (married) lover of her own (Elias Koteas). Meanwhile, he barely notices that Sandra (Shaw), the easy-going daughter of his father’s new business partner, is head over heels in love with him.
Leonard is too solipsistic and inexperienced to realise his amour fou for volatile Michelle can only end in tears, but Gray defuses the situation’s latent predictability by adding a final-act development that rivals the similarly ironic and troubling conclusion to We Own The Night. In addition, his film is such an effective and engaging character study of its tormented, flawed and, as it turns out, not entirely sympathetic protagonist that we overlook the fact that most blokes would be delighted at having the pick of such prospective paramours.
Two Lovers may possibly not sound like much on paper and, just as Phoenix’s performance walks a narrow line between inspired verisimilitude and jittery mannerism, Gray runs the risk of turning an essentially small-scale story into something overwrought. Instead, aided by editor John Axelrad and cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay (plus Dana Sano’s evocative score and an ensemble of rock-solid performances) he crafts an exquisite miniature that will almost certainly figure my top 10 films of the year.
Taken together, Gray’s last two features confirm him as an unusually talented, understatedly stylish presence on the margins of the current American mainstream. The French apparently regard him as “the next Martin Scorsese” and, hyperbolic though it may sound, it’s not too hard to see why.
With David Lynch stuck in what looks – after 2006’s Inland Empire – disturbingly like a downward creative spiral, how timely that his daughter Jennifer should, a decade and a half after her disastrous debut, Boxing Helena, stage such an unexpected and belated return to prominence with lowish-budget thriller Surveillance.
In terms of mood and ambience, the Lynch apple clearly hasn’t fallen very far from the tree. Indeed, anyone who didn’t know any better might possibly mistake the early reels of Surveillance as the work of Lynch pere (who is credited as executive producer) rather than fille. That’s partly because the main actors are a pair of oddball cops, not-too-distant cousins of Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper, perhaps, played by sometime David Lynch collaborators Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond as Sam and Elizabeth. The pair arrive at an out-of-the-way police station that’s coping with the aftermath of a brutal multiple homicide – the only witness to which is a traumatised eight-year-old girl, Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins). Sinister shenanigans duly ensue. Part of the fun of Surveillance lies in trying to second-guess the “shocking” third act rug-puller, although one doesn’t exactly have to be Perry Mason to see what’s coming round the next corner.
And whereas Lynch junior has clearly studied the basic concomitants of her father’s style, she shows little of his élan or inspiration in terms of putting them together at the service of either an engaging story or a probing journey into the psychological dark side. Instead, the arch, stilted and self-consciously offbeat Surveillance is essentially a somewhat clunky B-picture, one that would surely have gone straight to DVD if its director’s surname had been Smith or Jones.
Wendy and Lucy, the third feature from writer-director Kelly Reichardt, is a slender, beguiling tale of economic hardship and stoic persistence that will most likely increase her following. In her favour are three factors: the chilly economic climate makes the picture feel very topical, there is the presence of a cute canine – Lucy – and Michelle Williams, who’s in pretty much every scene as Wendy.
We discover Wendy in small-town Oregon en route to find work in Alaska, her progress by the breakdown of her clapped-out Honda. The repairs prove unexpectedly costly and a bigger problem results when she’s arrested for shoplifting. While in custody, she loses track of her four-legged companion. Her search for the dog forms the bulk of the film’s narrative, bringing her into contact with a wide range of folk who are varying degrees of friendly, hostile or neutral.
Wendy and Lucy is an unassuming miniature, which runs a total of 80 minutes. Reichardt clearly intends to speak quietly but to speak volumes about the state of society in 21st century America, showing the consequences of Republican economics down the decades. Her film is likeably rough-edged, unadorned and attuned to the sapping frustrations of existence on or just below the poverty line.
However, Reichardt is so fixated on her heroine’s travails that intriguing peripheral figures remain under-explored. It’s frustrating that John Robinson’s rules-is-rules supermarket employee Andy has hardly anything to do apart from catch Wendy shoplifting, although at least his character is given the dignity of a name. Wally Dalton has the second biggest (human) part in the movie as a helpful security guard, but Wendy never bothers to ask what he’s called.
Perhaps Reichardt doesn’t intend Wendy to be particularly sympathetic and the character’s default mode of cow-eyed, wounded dignity certainly tests our patience at times. This pretty, trendily-attired young Caucasian woman makes, or a somewhat unrepresentative example of America’s exploited underclass – an example of Reichardt’s pill-sugaring tendencies. The film is worth a look, nevertheless.
Another young woman in difficult straits is the focus of The Young Victoria, although the problems faced by Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Hanover (Emily Blunt) in the Britain of the 1830s are of a rather different stripe. The picture, written by Gosford Park Oscar-winner Julian Fellowes, traces the tricky process by which the gauche Princess ascended to the throne as Queen Victoria and aims to show the human face behind the still-familiar, all-too-stern monarchical visage. Crucial to this is her courtship with and marriage to the dashing but intelligent Prince Albert von Saxe-Coburg und Gotha (Rupert Friend), a relationship which steadily grows to dominate the film and steer it from behind palace- doors politicking towards lushly-appointed romance.
It’s all pretty standard-issue corsets-and-corsages stuff with some flights of dramatic license that may surprise viewers familiar with Victoria’s early reign. It’s also a salient reminder of how German our royal family has been for so long and what a good egg the “able, clever, faithful” Albert was. Many have forgotten what a key role he played in Britain’s social and economic development through the 19th century.
Neil Young
