Whenever I’m feeling curious after finishing a movie, I’ll watch the trailer. Not that they’re always faithful to the director’s vision, but sometimes I’d like to see if someone out there (in this case, the marketing team) and I had at least seen the same movie. In Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers, the suspense that looms over a disintegrating marriage hatches its own categorical descendant. It’s not quite a romantic thriller, nor is it a thrilling romance. Maybe in the same opinionated battlefield that’s determining which holiday genre The Nightmare Before Christmas vibes with, The Killing of Two Lovers is entrapped in some Valentine’s Halloween Eve showdown.
Clayne Crawford is David — father, husband, a man’s man of the sensitive sort — living in rural Utah. Without owing an explanation to the audience, he and his wife, Nikki (Sepideh Moafi) are living separately. How mutual the agreement was, or how intact the word “separated” was going to be in their situation, are also undisclosed. Nikki stays with their children in their two-story brick home while David moves in with his father about a hundred yards away. I’d estimate that the separation has only been a short period; otherwise, David has been seeing red for an unreasonable amount of time. The opening scene illustrates the film’s title when it cuts to David pointing a revolver at a sleeping Nikki and another man. Unable to pull the trigger, he escapes from the house unnoticed and runs back to his father’s house. There, he unnervingly jumps into a natural joking rhythm and bargains over a candy bar with his dad.
On the surface, The Killing of Two Lovers preserves a gorgeousness in the coarse spaces between a person (usually David) and their surroundings. The 4:3 ratio, the snow-capped mountains crowning at the edge of many frames, and the claustrophobic small-town talk (where, yes, everyone knows your name) contribute to the pressurized deliberations mounting in his head whenever he’s alone. The positioning between object and background exposes the tides of physical loneliness and the buzzing promise that David needs to fix this situation. For the aesthetics, I could probably watch this to appease my desires for outdoor views and the adjacent-taste of dry wood in cold air.
Though it’s not a Halloween movie in a scary sense, one can’t help but anticipate the emergent psychosis that is bound to happen. It’s easy to sympathize with David since we can see that most of his pain derives from how much time he spends on piecing the family back together. Crawford plays tragedy in the way that Casey Affleck does in Manchester by the Sea or Adam Driver in Marriage Story — all of this with Joker energy. In the scenes where David is experiencing a negative emotion following a fallout, there’s a rhythmic thump (like a car door slamming or an axe blade meeting wood) interspersed with a gun barrel spinning. For a man who was about to shoot the mother of his children, there are few explanations that can justify that his actions are morally sound (though until the end, I had a Fight Club-ish theory).
It wouldn’t be fair to hold David to a standard of perfect behavior (ask me how I’ve handled a bad breakup!), but it seems like we’re carried into thinking that he’s a good man who is both physically and emotionally stuck. Some of this central character pathos could feel more relieved if we knew what Nikki was thinking, or even if Machoian threw us an expository bone. During an upset day at the park, their teenage daughter mentions that David “got mad and walked away,” which might be the closest to revealing what happened and speaks to David’s underlying anger issues. But imagine if there had been just one scene of David taking a shot of whiskey or accidentally hurting one of the kids. Even if it was supposed to be a one-time event, the action would have reverberated across his rap sheet.
But I’m placing a benign affliction on the movie. What movie doesn’t want to be ambiguous? And instead of debating with the marketing team on what kind of movie this is, it seems like the bigger question I should asked myself is, “Did I hate Joker so much that it’s playing into how I feel about this movie?” But I think I know myself (answer: no, I kinda liked how Joker ended/what it began), and admitting that I’m floundering between enjoying this film (which I did, and would recommend) and recognizing its flaws might mean that this isn’t one to pass over. Maybe I wouldn’t be rooting for David, but I’d love to hear how I’m wrong I am in the showdown.
The Killing of Two Lovers
2020
dir. Robert Machoian
85 mins
Now playing at Kendall Square Cinema!
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