Two Lovers

IF JOAQUIN Phoenix is to be believed, then this film offers us a final chance to enjoy his acting before he disappears into the persona of DJ Beardy Badrap. And, by golly, there’s a lot of acting to take in.

Phoenix plays Leonard Kraditor, the bipolar son of a dry-cleaner from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. Following Leonard’s latest attempt at suicide, the unhappy fellow’s dad introduces him to the pretty, if uninteresting daughter (Vinessa Shaw) of a potential business partner, but Leonard is much more intrigued by the mysterious woman who lives upstairs.

When you hear that Michelle, a legal secretary in Manhattan, is played by Gwyneth Paltrow, you will know that she is frail, needy and that she sounds as if she has a broken kazoo lodged in her trachea.

Joaquin, offered a juicily damaged character, takes every opportunity to hunch his shoulders, soften his consonants and scrutinise his laces. Yet the performance is not as mechanical as that makes it sound. Now 34 and looking his age, Phoenix injects such convincing fragile angst into Leonard that you begin to wonder if the role may indeed have unhinged the actor. The performance is worthy of a great film.

Sadly, Two Loversis not quite that movie. Gray, who directed Phoenix in The Yardsand We Own the Night, knows how to frame an interesting shot (watch as Gwyneth and Joaquin dodge pillars on the roof of their building) and he has a sure sense of place. But the characters all behave as if they have been unexpectedly flung forward from the year 1955 (and not just because the story has so many reminders of Marty).

Playing the hero’s parents, Isabella Rossellini, who behaves more like Ingrid Bergman’s daughter than the wife of a dry cleaner, and Moni Moshonov, a father from a Saul Bellow novel, don’t come across like people who were young in the 1960s. Their apartment seems free of any recent decoration, and the courtyard outside still echoes to the sound of bebop.

Two Loverscertainly has many things to recommend it, but it is too mannered and unconnected with the real world to fully engage the emotions. Come back, Joaquin. We need you to try that again in something a tad less arch.