Posts Tagged ‘Gwyneth Paltrow’

TWO LOVERS: 2 STARS FOR THE MOVIE 4 STARS FOR THE PERFORMANCES

two_lovers01Watching Joaquin Phoenix in Two Lovers made me wish he would go to the barber, get a shave and stop his infantile flirtation with becoming the new Vanilla Ice and get back to doing what he does best—create interesting, layered characters for the big screen. In Two Lovers, which Phoenix claims will be his last film, he hands in a towering performance that is simultaneously quietly intense and tortured.

Two Lovers is set in Brighton Beach, a small community on Coney Island, New York. Phoenix is Leonard, a man left devastated by a recent break-up. He’s moved back into his parent’s home and is working at the family dry cleaning business. He lives a life of quiet desperation until his matchmaker parents try and set him up with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the pretty daughter of a business associate. She becomes love number one. That same week he has a chance encounter with Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), his beautiful, but damaged upstairs neighbor. She becomes love number two, and complicates Leonard’s already complex emotional life.

Two Lovers is a deliberately paced film filled with rich, interesting performances. Phoenix subtlety gives Leonard a full inner life as his bi-polar character swings from high points to low. It’s a quietly riveting performance and one of the best so far this year.

Paltrow redeems herself after her dull work in Iron Man. She brings the beautiful and tragic Michelle to vivid life, playing her as a woman blinded by her need to be accepted by men.

The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent and well cast. Vinessa Shaw as the nurturing Sandra takes the least interesting of the three main roles and creates a fully rounded and appealing character, while Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov fill every frame they appear in with parental warmth.

Two Lovers moves slowly—one critic prescribed it as a “non-addictive, non-chemical cure for insomnia”—but for those willing to stay with the film’s reflective pace there are rewards.

COUNTRY STRONG: 3 STARS

3ad71c9cc49fc543_country-strongIn “Country Strong” Gwyneth Paltrow plays Kelly Canter, a troubled country music superstar whose husband (Tim McGraw) pulls her out of rehab to plot her comeback tour. While getting clean she befriends orderly Beau (“Tron: Legacy’s” Garrett Hedlund) who also, conveniently, happens to be a musician. Beau ends up sharing the tour’s opening slot with beauty-queen-turned-singer Chiles Stanton (“Gossip Girl’s” Leighton Meester), and all four end up sharing more than just music and road stories.

The first line of Country Strong’s catchiest song, Give Into Me, is “I’m gonna wear you down,” and sure enough the movie did wear me down in the last thirty minutes. For the first hour or so I thought the film had as much authentic country spirit as a Muzak version of a Hank Williams song but it finally won me over. As a look at the downside of the country music game it pales by comparison to last year’s “Crazy Heart,” but despite a script thick enough with clichés to choke Roy Rogers’s horse and the blandest direction this side of “Hee Haw,” it comes together in its closing minutes.

Much of this is due to its star Garrett Hedlund who rebounds from his bland leading man work in “Tron: Legacy” to deliver a convincing performance as a Townes Van Zandt-style singer-songwriter and love interest. He walks away with the movie, stealing it outright from Gwyneth Paltrow—I know, I know, she did her own singing… so did he—who can’t be down home no matter how hard she tries. She has a couple of moments—a really beautiful scene with a Make-A-Wish child and a drunken backseat conversation with Chiles— but the character is so thinly written there’s very little for her or the audience to hang onto. Leighton Meester fares a bit better, but mostly because her country Barbie character has good chemistry with Hedlund.

At almost two hours “Country Strong” is too long and despite its downbeat subject matter—the flipside of fame, alcoholism and jilted love—isn’t quite authentically hurtin’ enough to qualify as real country.