Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.

Se7en

David Fincher's Se7en remains in the public consciousness after a decade primarily for its climax -- both for its disturbing content and the endless parodies of Brad Pitt's anguished scream "What's in the baaaaahhhhx?! -- yet its influence on nearly all thrillers that would shoot for the adjective "dark" is nearly incalculable. Its grimy, slimy aesthetic informs countless psychological thrillers, and the extremity of the murders depicted set off a chain reaction that led to grisly crime on the ludicrous scale of Saw as well as the more scientific focus of C.S.I. and its spin-offs.

Upon revisiting Fincher's breakthrough, out now in a positively stunning Blu-Ray remaster, what stuck out at me was the surprising amount of emotion. The term "nihilistic" has been attached so often to the feature that even the new Blu-Ray describes it as such in its included booklet. Yet the film's downbeat, bleak ending does not translate to pure fatalism. Deep within the horrifying twists and turns of the film, Se7en ultimately focuses upon the central character, Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), and his arduous journey out of the very nihilism that both supporters and detractors see in the movie.

The first shot of the film, in fact, occurs away from the hell of Se7en's unnamed city, safe in Somerset's quiet home. Yet Fincher prepares us for the world outside the man's bedroom by watching the old detective ready himself for work. Freeman, an actor who always casts off a calming vibe, lightly smooths the wrinkles from his jacket. Then, he pockets a switchblade. Something outside clearly made this cop feel that a sidearm alone could not protect him, and when we see what it is, Somerset's nihilism seems almost comical in its insufficiency. If anything, the idea that he thinks a knife can hold back the darkness becomes a hopeful gesture.

After viewing an all-too-common "crime of passion" that leaves a husband dead -- "Just look at all that passion on the wall," he sighs -- Somerset heads out to a crime scene that will severely mess up his plans to retire at the end of the week. With his young, cocky replacement, Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), in tow, Somerset enters a fetid, roach-filled home where a mammoth of a man lies dead face-down in a bowl of spaghetti. Everyone jokes that the man ate himself to death, until they notice his hands and feet bound by wire and a bruise on his temple that suggests a gun pressed to his head. They were right: this guy did eat his fat ass to death, but it wasn't because of a lack of self-control.

Somerset knows this kind of crime is too meticulously planned and executed to be a random act, and he practically begs his captain (R. Lee Ermey) to re-assign him so that he doesn't leave in a week haunted by this killer. Sure enough, when a notorious criminal lawyer turns up dead the next day having been bled to death and left with the word "GREED" scrawled on the floor in his blood, it takes no time for Somerset to realize the pattern.

Each of the murders, based of course on the seven deadly sins, is intricate and, with the exception of the last two, gruesome. Yet Fincher displays a surprising amount of restraint in his view of these extreme crimes. His love of deep focus and his wry method of eliding around gratuitous shots allow him to show grisly scenes while still leaving things to the audience's imagination. Consider the manner with which he presents the Lust murder: Somerset and Mills track down a clue to an S&M parlor where they look at a photo of something the parlor owner designed for the killer, cut to an industrial club/brothel and a backroom where a man sits shivering and hyperventilating next to a bed with a dead prostitute we never quite see, then move to two interrogation rooms, one with the obstinate club owner and the other with the terrified patron. As the man explains having a gun put in his mouth as the killer ordered him, we finally see the photo, showing a knife mounted to a codpiece, and we understand in an instant what he did to that hooker without having to look at it.

That refusal to revel in the salaciousness of the material permits Fincher to devote his time to the characters. He never shatters Mills' confidence (not until the end, anyway) but he does dig deeper and suggest that the young man regrets his brash desire to come to the big city to solve more interesting cases, while his wife's (Gwyneth Paltrow's) obvious discontent drives a wedge between the loving couple that never becomes too stereotypical. The interplay between Mills and Somerset plays on the usual dynamic of the young cop and the old, wizened veteran, yet Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker update it for the '90s: when Somerset figures out the pattern of the killings, he heads to the library to research any literary work he can think of that mentions the seven deadly sins. Mills, a member of the attention-deficit generation, has to buy the Cliff's Notes of those books because he can't stand trawling through Milton and Chaucer.

Even the killer, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), is richly defined despite only appearing in the final act. In his best performance, Spacey doesn't overplay his hand and embodies the banality of evil: there is nothing remarkable about John. He spent years slicing his fingers to destroy his prints, but no one would be able to identify him even if he left a print at the crime scene. So thoroughly boring is the man that he not only has to walk into a police precinct to get noticed but scream until people look. The eyes, however, give it away: in John Doe's eyes in the look of a man who cannot stomach the world around him, who's egotism found an outlet in horrific, fundamentalist Christianity. As he leads Mills and Somerset to his most disturbing setup, he spits venomous dismissal of his victims that betrays his self-absorption behind his religious facade.

But the heart of it all is Somerset. His despair is palpable, and unlike the usual retiring cop who looks back on his career with nostalgia and camaraderie, the detective behaves like the soldier in The Thin Red Line who learns he's being shipped home: rather than make a brave show of wanting to stay and help, he can barely contain his relief over his escape. Somerset sports a habit of ticking a metronome every night both to distract him from past horrors and to drown out the sound of street crime just outside. When Tracy, who doesn't know anyone else in the city, confides in him that she's expecting, he can only offer advice by way of relating his own experience with getting a young woman pregnant many years ago and talking her into an abortion to spare a child the nightmare of growing up in this hell.

Try as he might, however, he cannot leave his work behind them. It is Somerset who guesses the motivation for the killings, who does the thorough research and who even submits to being his replacement's inferior just to stay on and see the case through. A brief conversation with the captain uncovers the humanity in them both: the C.O.'s refusal to believe that Somerset can just quit after so many years on the force seems less a proud inability to see the dangers of the job rather than an insight into his own thought process. Implicit in his speech to Somerset is the notion that he, too, once thought of running away from this futile job, but he couldn't leave without feeling guilty about not helping, the same feeling that tugs at Somerset to finish the case and even stay with the police at the end.

Thus, Se7en is a film about humanity regained, not lost, and its grotesquerie comes to match the same level of exaggeration in numerous Christian allegories. The disillusioned priest in Shyamalan's Signs regains his faith after the terrifying ordeal of an alien invasion. Hell, the entire corpus of Flannery O'Connor reintroduces faith through downright catastrophic means. That religion should be the evil to motivate a character to rediscover his humanism is but the wryest and cleverest trick in a film that expresses a routine enthusiasm, never for the particulars of its crimes but in the ingenuity of its execution. This unexpectedly moral ending, which reveals the intelligence of the film, is the perfect book-end for the opening credits, which revel in the balls-to-the-wall, style-breaking aesthetic of the film. For a long time, that Brakhage-influenced opening represented the zenith of the picture, yet I didn't notice how smart the thing was until it was released at its most visually-appealing.

Iron Man 2

Two years ago, Iron Man became one of the few films with a budget over $100 million that might conceivably be called a "surprise hit." What was most surprising about it is how it pleased damn near everyone -- including this writer -- with barely anything to its credit. It lacked spectacle, had a more difficult time following up on its themes than The Dark Knight and managed to stretch the relatively short origin story of Tony Stark into two hours of one man riffing while something important seemed to be about to happen but never did. Luckily for Jon Favreau and Marvel, that man was Robert Downey Jr.

I have expressed and will continue to express bottomless derision toward the current trend in Hollywood of dancing around weak screenwriting by filtering it through a faux-postmodern prism, retaining all the bad elements but acting as if they are excusable because the writer knows they suck. However, if anyone can force that current of open lethargy into something entertaining, it's Downey. A more captivating and ingratiating sonuvabitch you'll never meet; Downey always has an air about him that suggests he hates the material, regardless of quality, more than the most dismissive Internet troll ever could, yet he routinely makes good films better and weaker ones memorable. On the rare occasion that he plays a character whose excesses build beyond his control, as he did early in his career in Less Than Zero and recently in Zodiac, the actor can be an emotionally devastating specter of a fallen man.

The first Iron Man never called for that side of Downey's acting prowess and contented itself simply with unleashing his smarmy detachment upon the world in a glorious burst of one-liners that made the film the best comedy of the summer to make up for its often tedious structure. Its sequel, however, could have benefited from a moment or two of reflection, when Downey's facade remains but cracks irreparably to show the raging fear and loathing within. Instead, it chooses to cut off its fleeting severity with comic relief, if not a desperate cut to another location as if literally running away from context. Iron Man 2 suggests that the power source Tony Stark built to save his life might actually be killing him in another way, and Stark's main course of action is to just cover this up from everyone to appear strong, a fitting metaphor for a film that attempts to posit every stereotypically "American" cinematic value through its obscenely wealthy businessman-hero.

Yes, it's going to be that kind of a review, but, in fairness, the Iron Man series is currently the most openly political comic book film franchise to hit theaters. Its hero found his calling after being kidnapped by Arab insurgents and discovering that the weapons his company designed passed into enemy hands. This brought about a personal epiphany and a question about the possibility of only supplying one party in a modern, global network, which was almost immediately discarded to reconstitute the film as nothing more than a contrast between a grating but moral businessman and the evil, greedy corporate weasel who actively sold products to America's enemies. Stark defeated this man and went straight to a hearing where he brazenly revealed his secret identity to the world.

Iron Man 2 picks up right where its predecessor left off, and the best that can be said for this turn of events is that the film does at last give us a comic book hero who not only doesn't doubt his powers or capacity when the sequel comes around; rather, he's so psyched that he tells everyone. Perhaps if Favreau had followed that line, a truly original one in the over-exposed yet still young and potential-filled field of comic book movies, Iron Man 2 might have made for interesting and fresh viewing. But the political aspect returns, introducing bigger issues yet somehow compressing them into even broader oversimplifications.

"I have successfully privatized world peace," he crows in a Senate committee hearing on the ownership of the Iron Man suit, a statement that horrifically elicits wild cheering from the crowd as Stark's chief critic, Senator Stern (Garry Shandling) is reduced to openly swearing in impotent rage at his nemesis. One sympathizes; the brash and arrogant Tony Stark that made for such a cheeky twist in the first film is gone, replaced by a whirling maelstrom of narcissism. Stark's self-love has morphed into outright solipsism, forcing the audience to follow around a character who does not want us to identify with him, who would not even let us wax one of the many cars he rarely drives.

With his pencil-thin mustache, hands-on approach to his inventions, rampant womanizing and erratic behavior terms "eccentricity" due to personal wealth and social standing, Tony Stark is most clearly modeled upon infamous playboy/basket case Howard Hughes, who also defied governmental authority and got away with it because of his wealth. But Hughes, despicable and hateful little man that he was, has an air of tragedy that Tony lacks.

Perhaps that's just a result of the times changing. Hughes' tics and obsessions would raise eyebrows today, but a half-century ago they were outlandishly scandalous. Stark, on the other hand, enjoys a world filled with vacuous, flash-hungry millennials so inundated with Internet gossip and so dumbed-down by, well, movies like this that the cocky antics of this incorrigible billionaire are perceived as cool. "Blow something up!" yells one young man from the nether-region of off-screen ADR when Tony makes a grandiose entry to an expo in the suit, the man in question having clearly fallen for Iron Man during some filmed raid of a Middle Eastern locale. For these fictional people, the act of seeing something on video instantly renders it entertainment in the same way our own intermittent carpet-bombing of Baghdad across the decades looks like a video game.

In this sense, Iron Man 2 offers the audience a strange opportunity to watch itself watching the film, a potentially metaphysical commentary on the nature of blockbusters in altering our sensitivity to violence and our acceptance of those "Amurican" values of isolationism as strident individualism and physical strength (this theory is inherently flawed, however, when you factor in Stark's hyper-intelligence and the opposition with which the people who most ardently embrace such hawkish nonsense as patriotism typically view the highly educated). I say "potentially," of course, because Favreau wants nothing less than to follow up on these sociopolitical tendrils, clearly willing as he is to present them so nakedly.

And so, Tony is permitted to live his life of staggering hypocrisy, cutting weapons development from Stark Industries (which existed almost exclusively to make weapons) while keeping the most advanced and dangerous weapon, whether he admits it's one or not, in the world for himself. When someone like Senator Stern, who is left without party affiliation, points this out, he is shamed not only within the film by Stark and his blinding (perhaps literally, given what he can get away with) charisma but outside of it by the director, who films Shandling in so unflattering a light you'll wish he'd directed that episode of The Larry Sanders Show he guested on, if not all of them. As it happened in the far more abhorrent -- aesthetically, structurally and morally -- Transformers 2, the sole voice of reason is presented as a nasally, pernicious genital wart, a bureaucratic farce who has the audacity to stand in the way between us and shit getting blown up. What an asshole.

Fine, so Jon Favreau maybe isn't the person to iron out (get it?) the political implications of Iron Man, though perhaps they should find someone who is since the hero is a conflicted weapons dealer and that brings with it political ramifications. But let's stop beating this horse for a while when so many more horses have been generously donated by Stark Industries for glue production. Perhaps I should get into the plot soon.

Oh, but that'll just make me angrier. Iron Man 2 pairs Tony against Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), who builds his own arc reactor from blueprints his father made when he was the partner of Tony's father, Howard. Justin Theroux reworked Ivan and his father, Anton, from Anton's roots in the comics as the Crimson Dynamo into a much more inherently interesting story. Whiplash, originally a Stark employee turned rogue, is now the son of the scientist Tony's father had deported and discredited, giving him a link to the hero that could prove fruitful. Further, the two make for terrific foils: both are the sons of scientific geniuses, partners even. Both of those fathers were emotionally distant, Howard from his work (which, as we learn, was more far-reaching than his son ever knew) and Anton from his alcoholic bitterness; the difference, of course, is that Tony grew up in the lap of luxury while Ivan must get by with DIY experiments.

That too, flies out the window as quickly it appears, leaving Rourke to indulge his wackiest indulgences, chief among them a strange relationship with a parakeet. Supposedly he caused so much stress in production that Favreau changed the film to bar Rourke from returning in a future installment, but perhaps the actor just got bored with having to sit around all day to drawl his 12 lines in a thick Russian accent. You might go a little stir-crazy too.

He's lucky to have any lines at all, though, considering just how much they managed to somehow cram more words into Downey's mouth. Much as the limp-fisted political content riles, it cannot compare to Iron Man 2's crucial flaw: too much of a good thing. Downey spit out self-aggrandizing lines at a blinding pace in the first film, and the one-liners fly so fast here that most are lost in the shuffle. He and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks so confused and frustrated by how quickly everything is moving you almost pity her) lock themselves into so many overlapping arguments that Altman might be invoked had the layered dialogue been remotely understandable or there for any reason other than to stuff in as many jokes as possible. As I watched Iron Man 2, I thought less of The Dark Knight, which for all its flaws is certainly still the best comic book film, and more of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. Both franchises feature an offbeat actor playing a part practically created for him, allowing for a high-comic symbiosis that, in the case of the earlier film, made us forget we were watching a movie about a damn theme park attraction and, in Iron Man, effortlessly propelled a film without much narrative thrust. But but franchises oversold their hot ticket with the successors, now actively trying to capture what had just been a harmonic tuning until the quirky-but-natural performances feel processed and forced.

Pepper gets a storyline of her own as Tony's pick as replacement for CEO of Stark Industries, though we only get to see her when she edges into Tony's periphery, when she's spending more time still running PR for Tony than running the business she was so happy to inherit. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) also shows up to discuss S.H.I.E.L.D. operations with Tony, and a new assistant named Natalie (Scarlett Johansson) factors into Tony's life as well. These are all tiny threads in a tapestry that was never woven together, taking away time from Tony's conundrum with his arc reactor, his conflict with Whiplash and his ongoing debate with the United States government while never progressing on their own terms. Like just about every other sequel, Iron Man 2 simply decides to be bigger without being better, barely leaving time for any action scenes and spending more time ogling computer-animated images of how computers might one day...animate images than it does with any character.

Surprisingly, the worst element of the film, rival weapons dealer Justin Hammer, is actually the most enjoyable, thanks to a giddy performance by Sam Rockwell. To make Tony Stark look well-adjusted, they had to turn Hammer into a joke of a character, a sniveling incompetent who receives government funding when Stark drops out of the weapons game -- and why isn't military-industrial collusion a focus of any amount of concern in these films? But Rockwell owns the part, parlaying the greasy charm he brings to his vilest characters into a faux-suave schmoozer who can barely keep ahead of his own uselessness as an inventor. His interplay with Rourke, all motor-mouthed schmoozing and awkward capitulation in the face of Ivan's tacit stonewalling, is hilarious, and possibly not at all faked if Rockwell and the others had to contend with Rourke's infamous preening and petulance.

Indeed, I almost, almost, want to give Iron Man 2 a pass simply because it raises the mainstream profile of three of my favorite living actors. It cements the "don't call them comebacks" of Rourke and Downey and offers Sam Rockwell his most visible job yet, perhaps paving the way for him to unleash the talent he's been refining just off the beaten path for a few years now in works like Snow Angels, Choke and Moon upon the mainstream world. Even Lt. Col. James Rhodes gets an upgrade, replacing Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle over money hassles.

And yet, no one has enough time to make a real impression, except Downey, who frankly has too much. Even if they did, they could never fully distract from the film's glaring weaknesses. If the first Iron Man managed to work without a propulsive plot, its sequel introduces so many storylines that it never moves into the action extravaganza it thinks it is. That's actually the most fascinating trait of these films: both times this franchise has tricked people into this its spare moments of action somehow fill most of the film's length, even though more time is spent on the advanced computers in Stark's home than with the Iron Man in battle. This deception remains a curious psych-out that could possibly save studios a great deal of money on their blockbusters if anyone could work out how Favreau pulls it off, if he is even consciously aware of the effect at all. But with the Stark levels constantly in the red, the lack of releasing spectacle is more evident here, and Iron Man 2 often wobbles between its belief in its own cool and the reality of its inaction. Frankly, I knew I was in trouble when Tony's first action in the film, flying ostentatiously into a stadium as fireworks explode and barely-dressed women dance around him, only to then immediately launch into a speech about changing the way the world gets energy. That's like setting off Roman Candles before you make a goddamn time share pitch. In that one ludicrous moment is the whole film: an idiotic distraction that wants to flirt with seriousness but has commitment issues.

I cannot say that Iron Man 2 is everything wrong with mainstream American cinema and our self-perception, not with Transformers 2 bumbling around the universe. It lacks the overt racism of Bay's disaster (and, truth be told, the first Iron Man, with its pathetic scenes of wish-fulfillment concerning the War on Terror), as well as the sexism, fashioning Natalie Rushman into a capable, strong fighter and letting Pepper be reasonable without being lambasted for it the way Stern is. Too, Favreau's direction is not quite sterling, but he has a better sense of staging than Michael Bay; aesthetically, Iron Man 2 is at worst passively unengaging, while Bay's style is far more offensively gauche and incompetent.

Yet the film still puts forward in laziness and unexplored themes what Transformers 2 actively advocated in its jingoistic ejaculation. Stark, already modeled for a past mogul, is an open throwback to '80s-era business excess, a time when corporate corruption was no less abhorrent but at least had a popular face under the condoned, even lauded hedonism of the wealthy under Reagan. We are made to believe that Tony, who does not wish to answer to the federal government but displays lip-service loyalty to America, to be the unequivocally "good" guy while people like Obadiah Stane and Justin Hammer, who will take their products where there is profit to be made, as evil. Both sides are ludicrously rich and filled with a sense of entitlement, but an outdated sense of patriotism absolves Tony. Yet one cannot look at the hypocritical vilification of Hammer or Stane without thinking of some of the current doublespeak involving Big Business by those beholden to it, the most recent example being the fiasco in the Gulf. Harebrained opportunists like Sarah Palin use the incident to call for an end to foreign oil, ignoring (or ignorant of) the impossibility of "domestic oil" when a company like, you know, British Petroleum is the one sucking up the black gold from our waters and land. Hammer and Stane should represent the insidiousness of globalization in relation to corporate crime and lawlessness, but instead they get to be easy targets that represent "bad business" while Tony gets to be the Reaganite star child without full reproach. For God's sake, the villain is even Russian, a nationality once again becoming our cinematic enemies either out of fear of Islamist reprisal or the continued desire to just return to simpler times when we just had to worry about a thermonuclear device instantly vaporizing us instead of all this car-bomb suspicion.

I certainly don't think, of course, that Favreau is intentionally putting forward this haltingly pro-unchecked capitalist (so long as those capitalists use some of their wealth to buy American flags) sentiment, but there's no way he didn't acknowledge some of the glaring political content, considering how much he undercuts personal insight to call more attention to senators and corrupt businessmen. What he is most guilty of is the same laziness the rest of America feels toward our current crisis: no one wants to fix the problem, only to return to a time when the problem wasn't noticeable.

We'd still like to thumb our noses at the problem though, and Iron Man 2 comes with a smugness common to the state of public perception at the moment, in which everyone would like to look down on everything, preferably without having to do anything so inconvenient as "research" or "reading." The film apathetically taps into our hatred of politicians, condescension and latently xenophobic rejection of downtrodden foreigners and our desire to continue the worship of money after its high priests have been exposed as rapacious, fraudulent thieves. Ultimately, Iron Man 2 wants nothing more than to turn us into that guy in the crowd, placed in the middle of an expo promoting technological advancement and the possibilities of scientific growth in a country that has vilified the educated and the fact-based in praise of the blinded faithful, unable to think of anything other than how cool it would be to see something blow up.

Two Lovers

Two Lovers, based on a Visconti film in turn based on the Dostoevsky short story "White Nights," might just be the biggest surprise I've had with a new release since, well, since I began to go to the cinema seriously back in 2007. Oh, I've been pleasantly surprised and bitterly disappointed since then, but nothing on the scale of this restrained romance. As I have said before in other reviews, it's always important to avoid buzz and other reviews of films you plan to see and critique; yet, as anyone who's ever plugged their ears to mute sound knows, you can never fully drown out the noise. I kept hearing dull, muted burblings about Two Lovers and its quality, but even then I simply wasn't prepared for what I saw.

On paper, Two Lovers has all the cluttered contrivances of an overripe melodrama: Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge in the first moments, but changes his mind upon hitting the water and calls for help. He returns home, and we sense from his family's reaction that he's tried something like this before. He cleans up in time for dinner to meet Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), daughter of his father's business partner, and both sets of parents are clearly trying to set their kids up with each other. They indeed have a spark, but the next day Leonard meets his neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), standing in the hallway suffering the abusive screams of her father. Leonard invites her in to his apartment for a respite, and their attraction is immediate. Michelle, though, is dating a married man.

If it seems that I've just waded knee-deep into spoiler territory, know that director James Gray reveals all of this in the first 20 minutes. Gray piles these exaggerations together so quickly and with such a straight face that it never becomes silly, and he uses the other 80 minutes to shape these elements into a searingly realistic depiction of an odd love triangle. As Sandra is the child of close family friends, she knows of some of Leonard's problems and wants to help him. Michelle, addicted to drugs and trapped in warped relationships with the men in her life, is more a reflection of Leonard, just as messed up and self-destructive.

The choice between the genteel, composed superego of Sandra and the unrestrained id of Michelle hardly constitute a revolutionary new structure in a love triangle, but placing a mentally unbalanced protagonist in the middle adds an unsettling layer to the mix: no longer is this setup a means to tempt a man either into bliss or hell but a fully realized drama that offers multiple potential outcomes for either choice. Sandra could nurse Leonard out his depression and instability, but the same is possible for Michelle; Leonard's obvious care for her offers the first fully reciprocated relationship in her life, and perhaps, like an addicts' support group, they can better aid each other through empathetic connections.

The true joy of the film -- if a movie this subdued and quietly devastating can in any way have the signifier "joyous" attached to it -- is its perfect grasp of the harsh reality of love. Love these days hits the screen only in staid, outrageous rom-coms that simplify its concept into nothing more touching than two attractive people gradually coming to overlook their personalities in favor of physical attraction. It is a disgraceful poisoning of what love is and means and if it wasn't for the beautiful and painful love stories of modern Asian cinema I might believe that love had died. Two Lovers recognizes that we all act like fools when we're smitten, but it also understands that nothing on Earth is as deadly serious. We see Leonard's awkwardness when he spots Michelle entering a restaurant and reaches for a menu to look nonchalant, but he does no do so in a pantomime manner. Pronouncements of love are not delivered in grandiose speeches but in cautious, mumbled admissions, the sort of panicked whisper normally used for interrogation room confessions.

While Gray's screenplay and direction sets the film apart from the host of vacuous romantic films dominating the American market, Two Lovers succeeds ultimately, of course, on the strength of its actors. Paltrow, never one of my favorites, is devastating as Michelle, trapped between the horror of her current life and the terrifying risk of starting a new one. Shaw has the least screen time of the protagonists, but she makes every second count, her beautiful smile always flecked with a hint of sadness as she attempts to break through to Leonard. As for Phoenix, well, I never bought his absurd hullabaloo over his "retirement" from acting and always considered it a hoax. Now, I fervently hope that's the case: without ever forcing himself, he perfectly captures the essence of a man suffering from mild mental illness: he mumbles and rushes his words to hurry through conversations before he makes a "mistake," hides from the view of others and is subject to the whims of his mercurial mood shifts. His downbeat mania is nothing short of hypnotic. Also worth mentioning is Isabella Rossellini as Leonard's mother: forces are constantly pushing Sanda and Leonard together for business reasons, but when Ruth tells her son that she just wants him to be happy she's more genuine than 99% of all the other screen mothers who've said the same thing over the years.

I dare not write much more on Two Lovers, as written descriptions do no justice to its emotional impact. I will say, however, that anyone who finds its ending "happy" is a cockeyed optimist. The people who find Two Lovers ultimately happy are the same people who found the ending if A.I. sentimental, and actually they're not that different: in both films, a character's deepest wish comes true, but it's undercut with the horrible dread of its intimated hollowness. The three main characters of Two Lovers are all doomed in their own way, and they reflect better than any romantic film in recent memory the searing pain of a failed relationship.