Something in his weary trudge says that Leonard is heading for trouble. Two Lovers opens with Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) walking listlessly down a pier, climbing over the rail and diving feet first into the murk. On his way down the life wish takes hold, along with the hands of a rescuer who jumps in after him. His parents interrogate him with worried eyes when he stumbles home sopping wet. Leonard has tried killing himself before.
Two Lovers is about an unhappy and sensitive misfit at a crossroads, twitchy and awkward in his skin but blessed with a sense of humor. Living with Orthodox Jewish parents in the claustrophobic lower middle class comfort of Brooklyn, Leonard could find fulfillment on his present path at his father's dry cleaning business and with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), daughter of dad's new business partner. A photographer of haunted black and white urban scenes, Leonard is pressed into service to shoot Sandra's brother's bar mitzvah as the parents play matchmaker. Sandra's forward nature emerges quickly as the ice melts. Leonard likes her fine.
But his head is turned by the exotic shiksa visible from his bedroom window, a blond visitor from another world. Philip Roth and other post-World War II Jewish-American writers have explored the socio-sexual territory. Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) comes from Anglo-Saxon Protestant money. She's the assistant to a powerful Manhattan lawyer, a married man who keeps her in reasonable comfort for those late-nighters away from home. Well intended but ungrounded, a baby-faced cherub floating on clouds of romance, Michelle is a druggy denizen of the dance clubs in her off-hours, hoping against the odds that her boss lover will leave his wife. She's fragile and in need of a friend. Gazing at her with transfixed eyes, Leonard falls in love. Or do his over stimulated emotions disguise that she's nothing much more than a ticket out of dead-end street?
The collision course is set between the conflicting emotional poles of Leonard's life, between familiarity and strangeness, acceptance and escape, his desire to be cared for by the gently mothering Sandra and to play big caring brother to the needy Michelle. Filmed in a rich and somber palette that supports the roiling emotional drama, Two Lovers sits at that acute cusp where the particulars of a local setting meet universal concerns. Two loves is more than most people can bear. Leonard has to make a decision, unless destiny has already decided for him.
