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
This poem from Louis Aragon speaks of the ways we see others through merely our own lens. When gazing upon another, it’s not through some window in which we can observe their essence without filter, living their days unencumbered by our presence. Rather, we see everyone through mirrors, only able to conjure an image of them as reflected through our own visage. Thus each person we encounter and our interpretation of them is ultimately a series of projections: What about them reflects the things that we love, hate, desire and ignore about ourselves. Whether we like it or not, each relationship we have is filtered through myriad expectations that we subconsciously place on the other person due to our own baggage.
Ostensibly inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights, James Gray’s 2009 picture Two Lovers has an emotional current that is coursed through with this sentiment from Aragon’s poem. In those 66 words, Gray found the heart that would become this story of lonely divorcee Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) and his dilemma, torn between two women.
Living in an apartment with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov) after the disintegration of his marriage and several suicide attempts, Leonard finds himself drawn to Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the alluring, mysterious new tenant across the way. He meets Michelle during a spat with her boyfriend (who we later learn is a married man played by Elias Koteas) and Leonard shelters her from the dispute, connecting with her in his quaint home with his peculiar personality that reflects a damaged yet endearing soul.
Around the same time, Leonard’s parents introduce him to his father’s new business partner, and the man’s daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw). It becomes clear that these parental figures are attempting to set Leonard and Sandra up, and while she presents a calming aura, a gentle empathy and a sincere interest in him, Leonard can’t shake his fixation on Michelle. He discovers that, from his bedroom window, he can see into Michelle’s apartment, using it to observe her, daydreaming about what their life together could be.
In a conversation with Sandra, we learn that Leonard adores movies, and it’s easy to see how his fantasies of Michelle could come from a person who lives with a cinematic understanding of the world. It happens to all of us who have film ingrained in our soul. From early on, we see the world through this lens of stories that could only exist in the pictures: Grandiose, packed with emotion and romantic professions and saving each other from despair. The more Leonard learns of Michelle’s difficulties, the more he gravitates towards her. Things that should be red flags (you know, like being in a relationship with a married man) are merely obstacles that they’ll overcome on their path to a fated love. Shattered by a failed marriage that was no fault of his own—Leonard and his ex-wife both contain the rare gene for Tay-Sachs disease, meaning that their future children likely wouldn’t live beyond age 12—this is a man who has so much love to give, and life has told him over and again that he’s not allowed to give it. Why wouldn’t he push against that for the woman in the window?
When I spoke with James Gray recently for Letterboxd Journal on the occasion of the Criterion Channel’s collection James Gray’s New York, the director told me that he used a number of European features as influences. Chief among them was Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love, which similarly centers on a young man enamored by and obsessed with a woman he spies on through their apartment windows. “The key for Two Lovers was a somber and sober picture with as much humor as we could bring to it, but still about a very certain sadness and a purity in that sadness—not depressing, that’s a different thing, but sadness because sadness is beautiful,” Gray explains.
After making his trade in previous features steeped in the grit and grime of New York crime, Two Lovers was a major pivot for the director, and one he felt attacked a gap in the landscape of cinema. “Heartbreak deserves its own moment to shine in the movies, because heartbreak is one of life’s great truths and one of life’s great inevitabilities, and it’s unpleasant, so we don’t tackle it much in cinema,” he says. Indeed, there’s a deep reservoir of ache shrouding Two Lovers, capturing the sensation that, even as you’re going through the minutiae of your day, the smallest thing could make you crack into a million pieces.
For anyone familiar with Phoenix as an actor—including from his previous two collaborations with Gray, The Yards and We Own the Night—it came as no surprise that he easily slipped into the emotional pathos of Leonard. Phoenix knows how to convey inner turmoil, and from the opening scene in which Leonard takes a dive off a dock into the water you can sense that this is a man who needs support. “The actor I’ve used to compare him to many times is Montgomery Clift,” Gray tells me. “He has that glassy, vulnerable complexity.”
What was unexpected, especially coming on the heels of films like Walk the Line and Reservation Road, was how Phoenix balanced that gravitas with a lightness, a true sense of frivolity at times. When going out for a night with Michelle and her friends, Leonard is the life of the party, making up raps about himself on the drive there and busting out some alarmingly solid moves on the dance floor in front of a packed club of people. Gray wrote this part with Phoenix in mind, and you can sense that this playfulness comes from a director seeking an opportunity to show a side of his friend and collaborator that the world hasn’t often been exposed to.
That being said, there’s never a feeling that Leonard is a cool guy. He’s awkward and while the women find him endearing, he certainly gives off the vibes of a softboi type who tends to fall into the dreaded Friend Zone, as he does with Michelle. While can see from a mile away what Leonard is for Michelle, he dives headfirst into this courtship, happy to play second fiddle to her adulterous partner because he thinks being the nice, supportive guy will get him ahead. The irony there is that the other side of the coin is staring him in the face, as he ends up treating Sandra in a not dissimilar way to how Michelle treats him. Gray puts a point on this firmly in a mirrored piece of dialogue, where Sandra tells Leonard that she knows him and wants to take care of him. Later, Leonard almost says this same thing to Michelle.
Sandra puts up with a lot from Leonard, consistently showing interest in him despite signs that his mind is occupied elsewhere—not least of which is seen in the embarrassing moment where Sandra shows up to Leonard’s apartment for a date before she realizes that she was brought there under false pretenses: His parents lied that he wanted to see her, and he had no idea she was coming. Through it all, with the grace of Vinessa Shaw’s tender performance, Sandra never gives off the impression of a sap. She’s got a worldliness to her, a maturity and recognition for how things are. Maybe she knows that there’s another woman, but she also sees something special in Leonard and pushes through to maintain her presence. She shows an interest in his photography, black-and-white images of locations without any people in sight, a further reflection of how he sees the world: All about his own perspective, and no observation of others’ humanity. Through Shaw’s work, Sandra is a deeply human presence that has the potential to awaken something in Leonard—if he’s able to see it before it’s too late.
While the part of Leonard was written specifically for Phoenix, Michelle was written for Paltrow, with Gray saying that he felt the Shakespeare in Love Oscar-winner was an extremely underutilized actress. How she captures the tragic fumbling through life that Michelle faces is clear evidence of this, easily amounting to the best performance of her career. Two Lovers finds Paltrow at her most raw, her most electric, with immense anguish mixed with beguiling ethereality that at once allows us to see how she’s no good for Leonard but how he’s fallen under the spell of her charms all the same. She never seduces him, she doesn’t make him false promises, she doesn’t drag him along, but he can’t resist her. It’s an important distinction, as Gray never villainizes any of the characters in Two Lovers. He simply molds the story around those delicate ambiguities of life, and again that idea of what we look for and what we see in others.
“When it comes to ideas of desire, we are absolutely clueless,” Gray says, “because what we look for is in some ways what we lack, and we are blind. We don’t know the other person, really, and all of our desire is inherently superficial. Our idea of desire is entirely about projection.” Both of these women represent different things for Leonard, but ultimately Gray suspects Leonard doesn’t see who they really are because he’s projecting his own successes and failures onto them. No film has captured how we idealize others in relationships better than Two Lovers, and that strength in the raw, treacherous, complicated nature of love and humanity carries through to its ambiguous ending, which has been read a number of ways.
After a promise to run away with Leonard, Michelle abandons him in favor of her married lover, leaving Leonard shell-shocked and heartbroken yet again. Returning home as his parents are hosting a party, he settles down on the couch beside Sandra and embraces her, signifying that with Michelle gone he has accepted a place with Sandra. For some viewers, this is a devastating end, as Leonard is settling for something with which he can never be happy. For others, including myself, there’s optimism instead: Leonard has recognized that love isn’t some topsy-turvy toxic thing that only exists in the movies and has to come with tidal waves of emotions. That life and love can be simple, easy, warm and pleasant. I’ve always found the ending comforting in a bittersweet way, and I asked Gray how that finale sits with him—if it’s one of pessimism or optimism. “My instinct is that it’s probably both, which is life!” he answers. “There are certain aspects of it that say his dream is dead, and that sucks. What’s also true is that this dream was probably bogus to begin with.”
We are all, at our heart, dreamers, but those dreams by their very nature don’t live in the real world. For Leonard, Michelle was a trapped delicate bird he wanted to rescue, but she didn’t need rescuing. Sandra was the more plain and unexciting nice girl his parents liked and was the daughter of their business partner, and his life is going to be much more calm and peaceful with her. “Our lives are fraught, our lives are complicated, our lives are complex, and art must embrace this uncomfortableness,” Gray explains. “That is what connects us to others.”
Currently based in Newark, Delaware, Mitchell Beaupre is the Senior Editor at Letterboxd, and a freelance film journalist for sites including The Film Stage, Paste Magazine, and Little White Lies. With every new movie they watch, they’re adding five more to their never-ending Letterboxd watchlist. You can find them on Twitter at @itismitchell.