Mostly Love for Two Lovers

Directed by James Gray and starring Vinessa Shaw, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Joaquin Phoenix (in what may be his last role) Two Lovers is a drama about a troubled man, Leonard (played appropriately by Phoenix) who meets two beautiful women who are very different, yet similarly affect the psychologically ailing Leonard.
Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle says that Two Lovers is “sure to go down as one of the best films of 2009” despite its “standing up, easily achieved sex interlude”. The sexual tension in the movie, according to LaSalle, is purposeful and not overdone. He gives Two Lovers an extremely high rating.
Roger Ebert also gave Two Lovers a rather high rating, and assures readers that one can watch Two Lovers without any particular awareness of acting. He also points out that though the Leonard’s parents are portrayed as bourgeois, they are not overly “Jewish” as might be expected in a movie. Ebert calls its “a movie involving kinds of people we know, or perhaps have been,” which of course makes viewers more susceptible to enjoying a movie.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calls it, like many critics, one of Phoenix’s best performances, citing a “luminous fusion of grace and grit” between Phoenix and Paltrow. He reminds us at the end of his critique that this movie “will get to you.”
Oppositely, in Shawn Levy’s (of The Oregonian) opinion, Phoenix is not leading man material. He says “there’s virtually no electricity in the air, even when sex and death are present.” He even goes so far as to call the characters “phony” and that even if this is Phoenix’s last performance, it’s “a disappointing whimper to go out on.”
By far the worst reviewed received by Two Lovers was issued by Kyle Smith of The New York Post saying “the only possible interest the movie will inspire in anyone comes when Paltrow flashes a breast toward the end.” He calls Phoenix unattractive, agrees with Levy’s judgment that Phoenix should not be a leading man, and ripping the film to shreds.
Though the film received mostly good reviews, many of them, aside from Levy’s and Smith’s reviews, lamented the loss of Joaquin Phoenix to the film industry. Many of the reviews also said that this was a good way for Phoenix to go out, if indeed it is his last film.