Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix Is America’s Greatest Contemporary Actor

I fell in love with Spike Jonze's newest movie, Her, not only for its nuanced and empathetic view of how technology has rewritten, maybe even corrupted, human sociability and our capacity to handle anything outside predictable, programmed parameters, but also for the showcase it provides to Joaquin Phoenix, who knocks it out of the park as well as he did with last year's The Master. (I'm still mixed on that film, but not on Phoenix's performance.) The foregrounded relevance of Her got me thinking about how Phoenix has for some time now been the actor who has best conveyed shifting cultural attitudes over the last decade or so, so I wrote a piece about his more culturally immediate performances, and how this Gen Xer so skillfully reflects millennial life.

You can read my full article at Film.com.

The Yards (James Gray, 2000)

James Gray's The Yards is, like everything else he's made in his sadly infrequent career, a bold mix of classical, Fordian technique and Cassavetian acting whose alchemical properties transcend the clash of sensibilities into something simultaneously raw and operatic. Uniformly excellent acting never plays the material as merely symbolic, even if its view of corruption as a fixture of post-industrial commerce certainly offers its share of commentary. Its ending works because of its deflation, a true abstention from a system that offers no good option and therefore makes a simple act of quitting a kind of victory in its admission of defeat.

My full article is up at Movie Mezzanine.

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

James Gray opens We Own the Night with a brief montage of gritty black-and-white still photographs of policemen in the late 1980s. These photos could be a time-capsule for a pre-Giuliani New York, still dangerous, still filthy. Still human, too: a photo of a cop jokingly playing with a finger puppet policeman with a gun breaks up the severe tone of the other stills and seems as foreign to the city as it exists now as the grime that got swept away to make way for hiked rents. But this montage also makes the introduction of Joaquin Phoenix's club owner, Bobby Green, that much more striking. Gray cuts suddenly to the actor in a florid red silk shirt, walking in slow-motion toward the moll (Eva Mendes) lazing on his gold-colored couch in a gold-colored frame. It is the flip-side of the stark photographs' depiction of New York sleaze, the color-drenched euphoria of those who rule as banal warlords over their turf, however small it is.

The juxtaposition of this sweltering, stylish melodrama with the earlier, ascetic realism likewise offers a clue into Gray's approach for the film: always intimately focused with fly-on-the-wall shots that capture the smallest expressions on an actor's face, but framed epically in the style of Michael Cimino or Francis Ford Coppola. Family, whether biologically programmed for manually collected, is as key to Gray's film as it is to The Deer Hunter The Godfather, films whose opening weddings lend to the start of We Own the Night its languid observation and outsized scope. This director moves faster than the other two, quickly laying out who links up to whom, but he displays the same patience for the minute revelations of character communicated by interaction and shot placement. Gray establishes Bobby as stiffly cordial with his father and brother, Burt (Robert Duvall) and Joe (Mark Wahlberg) Grusinsky, police officers both, but familial with the Russian mobster, Marat, who owns Bobby's club. Gray's next film would be Two Lovers, and this just as easily might have been called Two Families. The care Gray takes in setting up Bobby's complicated relationships with both parties makes the later narrative developments natural outgrowths of a fully realized situation rather than the simple genre mechanics they may initially seem.

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a man so wracked by his carnal urges that he walks in convulsive, post-coital spasms and pants in ragged thrusts when he runs. At the conclusion of World War II, the seaman joins his comrades on a beach in the Pacific, wrestling, copulating with a woman made of sand and masturbating in a grimly violent celebration of peace. Back home, Freddie reports for a military psych evaluation, a farcical conveyor belt that feeds disturbed soldiers through a handful of perfunctory, still-new techniques in a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health. The results clearly show an unwell man, but director Paul Thomas Anderson cuts abruptly to the sailor working as a mall photographer, posing families into the waxy, beaming photos that define the period. Freddie effectively applies mortar to the bricks of postwar conformity, cementing it by turning every family into a false, overlit, eerie perfect image. Eventually, the irony gets to this loner, and he finds himself thrown into the wildernerss to drift.

Unable to fit in with even smaller communities, Freddie eventually stumbles his way to a yacht about to set sail, Anderson follows behind the man and racks the background in and out of focus, signifying Freddie's desire to be a part of the gathering on-board and his knowledge that he would not fit in. (In a less abstract way, it may also just be a visualization of Freddie's perpetual state of drunkenness, brought on by his homemade, paint-thinner-laced hooch.) Soon, Freddie wakes up in a cot on the ship, invited to meet the man in charge. The man (Philip Seymour Hoffman), does not give his name. Instead, he quizzes Freddie with a tone of disappointment, like a father whose boy has come home late. This puts Freddie at ease as much as it fills him with an embarrassment he does not typically feel as a freely fighting and fucking scoundrel. The man invites Freddie to remain with him, and the spastic, vulgar seaman soon finds himself the right-hand man in a burgeoning cult movement.

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.