photo Courtesy OF magnet pictures

Two Lovers: The movie you keep hearing about because of Joaquin Phoenix’s Letterman shenanigans.

*** Wendy and Lucy
Directed by Kelly Reichardt. Written by Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt. With Michelle Williams, Walter Dalton and Will Patton. (R)

The economy is front and center in Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, which captures the current mood with fortuitous prescience. Wendy (Michelle Williams) is a young woman from Indiana of no apparent means who is driving with her dog Lucy to Alaska when her Honda Accord breaks down in Wilsonville, Oregon. After being arrested for shoplifting, her dog disappears and, with her car unable to start, she'll have to make some tough choices before the film's brief running time is up. As in Old Joy, the director's previous east-of-Portland meander, Reichardt shows a lovely sense of pacing (she is her own editor) that makes the length of each scene feel just right.

The people Wendy meets speak in speeches, representing viewpoints rather than people, which is excusable as a Brechtian conceit, although the sometimes unconvincing acting doesn't help. But the question is what Reichardt and co-scenarist Jon Raymond are trying to say. A phone call indicates there's no one back home to help Wendy, but her suede Pumas, corduroy cut-offs and plaid shirt of Kristy McNichol vintage do not connote working-class struggle but upper-middle-class hipster. Wilsonville, we're told, is a depressed former mill town, but it's also the kind of place where the guy in the donut shop is reading Sometimes a Great Notion. Does Reichardt see a difference between the legitimately homeless and the group of young people Wendy meets who play at menial jobs in between piercings and rolling their dreads? When she's scared out of the woods by a crazy homeless man (producer and alt-horror auteur Larry Fessenden), is Reichardt saying that Wendy has just as much right to camp there?

As a simple tale of one woman's struggle to get out of a broken-down town, Wendy and Lucy works its quiet charms. For an indictment of economic inequality, you'll have to look elsewhere.

** Two Lovers
Directed by James Gray. Written by James Gray and Richard Menello. With Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Isabella Rossellini, Moni Moshonov and Elias Koteas. (R)

Like Jerry Lewis, James Gray (We Own the Night) is an American director much loved in France and often reviled in the U.S., and his latest, Two Lovers, may explain the cultural divide. Loosely based on Dostoyevsky's White Nights (which also inspired last year's Sony-Bollywood venture Saawariya) and set in Brighton Beach, the location of Gray's first film Little Odessa, it is safe to say that its characters bear no resemblance to anyone living, dead or about to be born.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard, a suicidal aspiring photographer who has moved back in with his parents, who have practically arranged his marriage to Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a nice Jewish girl whose parents want to buy their dry cleaning establishment. But then Leonard meets Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the mysterious shiksa across the way who's being kept by rich, married Ronald (Elias Koteas), and ladies, if your man is setting you up in Brighton Beach it's time to find a new sugar daddy. Sandra, if not Michelle, finds Leonard irresistible, although Phoenix plays him just this side of mental patient.

Gray seems to have gone through Saul Bellow's mid-'50s garbage and smothered that uncrumpled bit of story in inauthenticity. How Jewish are Leonard's parents? They met at a Workmen's Circle dance! They reminisce about the Catskills! (How old are these people?) Perhaps the French do not know that Jews do not keep dreidels in their china cabinets, and Jews who dance with the opposite sex at bar mitzvahs do not post pictures of the late Lubavitch Rebbe Menachem Schneerson in their dry cleaning establishments. Gray, who is Jewish himself, and a New Yorker, should know better. Did I mention that Leonard is carrying the Tay-Sachs gene?

If Gray's Brooklyn characters seem to have been imagined by someone from Mars, his glimpse of Manhattan high life is no more authentic: when Ronald orders a drink in a Central Park South restaurant, the waiter says, "Right away, Mr. Blatt" like he's in some '30s movie. But equally old-fashioned is the film's insistence on class immobility, in its gloomy certainty that Leonard is doomed to work in the family business, that one can never truly leave Brighton Beach, although the filmmaker himself is a blue-collar son of Queens. But then, with his taste for melodrama over irony, Gray may well be a man out of time.

**1/2 Madea Goes to Jail
Written and directed by Tyler Perry. With Tyler Perry, Derek Luke, Keisha Knight Pulliam, Ion Overman and Viola Davis. (PG-13)

After a hiatus that saw Tyler Perry making dreary soap operas that seemed like bids for mainstream acceptance, Atlanta's auteur has donned the mumu again for Madea Goes to Jail, a welcome throwback to Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea's Family Reunion. The drag is terrible, the makeup worse, and Perry's filmmaking skills seem to have declined, if that's possible, but it's the most enjoyable film he's made since Why Did I Get Married?

Chief among its pleasures is Keisha Knight Pulliam, little Rudy Huxtable herself, as a junkie hooker in need of being saved, and Oscar nominee Viola Davis as a tough-talking minister who walks the mean streets with a purse full of condoms and clean needles. Both take their roles utterly seriously, as if they weren't playing opposite a 6'5" man in a dress. As in the previous films, Perry also plays Madea's elderly brother, here hooking his oxygen up to a bong (bet Cheech and Chong never thought of that one), and her son, a lawyer whose crackhead wife seems to have disappeared from the series entirely.

For most of the film, the gun-toting granny's shenanigans — which include a counseling session with Dr. Phil — take a back seat to the sad tale of Candace, who shares a dark secret with an old college friend (Derek Luke) who is now an ADA. That secret, and his engagement to a colleague (Ion Overman) who sends Candace to jail, bring up class issues rarely dealt with on screen.

"Lord, do I have to listen to all this melodrama?" complains Madea. Well, that's what we're here for; that and the sermon. Sounding very much like Dr. Phil, Madea rails against victimhood, urging her fellow inmates to take responsibility for their own actions: "Suck it up and shut the hell up." But really, it's easier when you have friends in high places. Also, never trust a woman in a snug-fitting suit. And make sure to get a regular prostate exam. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

editor@newhavenadvocate.com