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March 5-11, 2009
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Phoenix rising
by Michael Phillips
A three-dumbensional experience
by Mark Olsen
 Phoenix rising
by Michael Phillips
Joaquin Phoenix has been having a rough time in the media lately. There was the mumbled charity-benefit announcement that he was retiring from acting. The David Letterman appearance where he was so silent and awkward that Letterman eventually quipped, “I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight.” Ben Stiller’s Academy Awards routine — where he chewed gum, donned a matted wig and beard and wandered vaguely around the stage — was a clear imitation of Phoenix’s recent appearances. In the space of a month, Phoenix has become an easy visual joke.
It’s no wonder that the director and producers of his alleged last acting project are worried that the media attention will overshadow their film. Two Lovers is a small, delicate concoction of moods and moments, far quieter than all the current Phoenix-related hoopla.
But his heartbreaking performance may incline audiences to think of him in a new light, or at least return to thinking of him in the old one.
Phoenix stars as Leonard, an emotionally ravaged Brighton Beach Jew who begins the film by attempting to drown himself in Sandy Hook Bay. Afterward, he shuffles away from his rescuers, soaked and sheepish, and shuts himself into his room as his father and mother (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) whisper fearfully outside. He’s well into his 30s, but thanks to a broken engagement, a bout with depression and a previous suicide attempt, he’s living like a teenager again, in his parents’ home. They’re the source of his job, his limited social life, his meals and even his romantic prospects, represented by prototypical “nice Jewish girl” Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father’s proposed business partner. Leonard’s parents mean well, but their attempts to help and control him overshadow him as heavily as his failures.
Eventually, Leonard seems to see a way back to independent adulthood via bubbly blond neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), whose self-absorption and easygoing chatter take the focus off him. When she doesn’t immediately share his attraction, he tries settling for the sweet, undemanding Sandra, but he can’t help repeatedly trying to force himself into Michelle’s life, perhaps to escape his own.
Thanks in large part to Judd Apatow, the multiplexes are full of films about bumbling boy-men just starting to grow up, but Two Lovers reads as a gentle repudiation of the whole cinematic fad. Leonard’s arrested development is complicated and nuanced, bound up in honest affection for his family as well as frustration, and he’s full of minor surprises, particularly when he’s called upon to enter Michelle’s hyperkinetic world. Phoenix plays him beautifully, as a man who’s limited but not stupid, struggling but not out of control. The film centers completely on his performance.
By contrast, the two lovers of the title get short shrift. Co-writer and director James Gray showed a similarly keen sense of relationships, troubled souls and closely observed New York neighborhoods in his three previous films, Little Odessa, We Own The Night and The Yards. But he and writing partner Ric Menello make a serious sin of omission by not giving Michelle or Sandra the depth of personality to match Leonard’s. But the film’s quiet earnestness, its solid grounding in Leonard’s family and its sense of impassioned loneliness carry it beyond the sometimes frustratingly one-sided plot. If Phoenix does carry through on his threat to leave acting behind for good, he could hardly ask for a more tastefully executed, sweetly melancholy swan song.
—MCT
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 A three-dumbensional experience
by Mark Olsen
Younger audiences, perhaps used to the adoptive personas of online realities, seem less bothered by questions of authenticity than previous generations. So it should be no surprise that the opening of Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, ostensibly a concert documentary, features a sequence of the band being chased by fans that seems “real” only in the same sense as an episode of The Hills.
Directed by Bruce Hendricks, who also fashioned the recent Miley Cyrus 3-D concert movie, the film is awkwardly stitched together from candy-gloss arena concert footage and somewhat grimier-looking backstage/limo/hotel room moments. There is no attempt to make it all hang together as an organic whole, as the stop-start momentum of moving from onstage to off is mostly just handled by having an ornate Jonas Brother logo swoop across the screen. To heighten the film’s three-dimensional effects, there is much flicking of guitar picks, spritzing of bottles, tossing of sunglasses and thrusting of microphones. Be prepared to feel silly after you duck.
The band-on-the-run farce has been a staple of rock films since A Hard Day’s Night, and the freewheeling take on fandom of JB3D was done better in the underrated ABBA: The Movie. Here, far too often, the crowds are rendered as animal hordes of screaming mouths and grasping hands. The film essentially opens and closes with a Brother asking for something to be served to them, an air of blasé entitlement undermining what should be their more boyish charms. At one point the three brothers are raised on pedestals above the crowd.
The Brothers come across more machine-tooled than homespun. The backstage footage doesn’t even allow them the smart/cute/quiet/funny personalities of John, Paul, George and Ringo. They all kind of blend together. Their grasps for authenticity — they do write their own songs and play their instruments — just feel like another layer of artifice. The concert’s music seems as nominally live as that of the notoriously sweetened KISS Alive album, and the film’s end credits noticeably include three recording studios.
The songs bleed together, one bouncing clap-along chorus to the next, mostly sounding like a modernized iteration of the glam-pop style of Cheap Trick or Redd Kross, but minus the Rust Belt roots or ironic self-regard. The one who mostly sings (Joe?) draws heavily from the Mick Jagger school of chicken-dance arm flapping, while the other two bop around with guitars on, triangulating the stage so at no moment is a portion of the audience Jonas-less.
Shortly after a number with pop songstress Demi Lovato, the equally young country singer Taylor Swift comes onstage. Swift conveys a boldly assured stage presence and an emotional depth to her self-penned lyrics that make the tutored showmanship of the Jonases seem all the more hollow.
At a recent media preview screening, just listening to the audience full of teenage girls singing and clapping along to the Jonases’ recordings playing over loudspeakers before the film even started was a more emotionally vibrant experience than anything conveyed in the movie. The audience’s connection to these songs (and the Jonas Brothers) is genuine. The attitude displayed by Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience back toward those fans comes across as a curious mixture of shameless pandering and discreet contempt.
—MCT
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