REVIEW: Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

Woody Allen does not read the reviews of his films. Some people think he should, but I think it is a good thing. Only a film director utterly unaware of the ‘narrative’ other people are making up for him – early funny ones, great middle period, the grim Bergman period (totally underappreciated), the lazy later ones and the recent return to form (which seems to have happened at least three times) – would have a confidence to release films so set in their own unique ways as You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger and To Rome With Love either side of something as crowd-pleasing as Midnight in Paris. Some of Woody Allen’s best films are simple elaborations on themes already tackled elsewhere – the grim but brilliant Another Woman and the carefree musical Everyone Says I Love You share the same plot point. That said, Allen’s new film, Magic in the Moonlight, will most likely play like an unintentional gift to his more negative critics – evidence for their (incorrect) assertion that he is simply not trying anymore. Magic in the Moonlight is indeed wafer-thin, light entertainment, but does it suggest that Allen isn’t that bothered?

Colin Firth plays Stanley, a magician who spends his free time exposing fraudulent psychics. Invited by his old friend Howard (Simon McBurney) to the south of France, where a rich family are besotted with a new psychic Sophie (Emma Stone), whose tricks even Howard cannot figure out. Stanley agrees, but after meeting Sophie, he cannot uncover her secrets or explain how she does it. He begins to wonder if there really is something supernatural about her and, hence, about the world.

Magic in the Moonlight then is about a moody and outspoken atheist who is suddenly faced with something that science cannot explain. Stanley cannot sleep at night such is his fear of a meaningless existence and when Sophie’s abilities start to break down his (dis)beliefs, he is first sceptical and then overjoyed. Firth is good here, overwhelmed by joy and excitement – as we all would if we suddenly found proof of the possibility of an afterlife. The twist ending is both totally expected and yet mildly disappointing, like waking out of a cheery dream.

Beyond that, there is disappointingly little to Magic in the Moonlight. The film is full of conversations about atheism and faith, as if the film needs to establish the stakes of this dilemma that we have all surely gone through at one point or another. Most of the dialogue is heavy on exposition – there is a lot of explaining for a film as slight as this. Some scenes wander badly while some of the snappy scenes are not nearly snappy enough. Sometimes it feels like something Noel Coward wrote in the early-1940s, which isn’t a particularly good thing. The film feels stretched at 97 minutes – already a bit on the long side for a Woody Allen film – considering that a film as deep and rich as Another Woman was twenty minutes shorter. There are some jokes about Nietzsche but they aren’t good ones – there is no sense here that Allen has even read Nietzsche. In fact there are very few jokes, a lot less than the plot would suggest and a lot less than can be expected of Allen.

Taken as light entertainment, the film is fine. It is entertaining and it is diverting, but only in the way of a TV movie scheduled in the middle of a lazy, rainy afternoon. The cinema feels like the wrong venue for this film, since the cinema encourages more attention and focus than this film can sustain. It is decent, but it is wholly disposable in a way that other supposedly disposable Allen films were not. The ending is so uncertain and rushed it feels like an awkward shrug. It is probably the first Allen film to feel as if it was made only to sustain his one-film-a-year record. So, a bit dull, not awful but not nearly funny enough either, reasonably likable when it is playing. Though you can’t help but wonder what some first-time writer-director would do with these actors, this budget and this idea.

See also:

Blue Jasmine

REVIEW: Fading Gigolo (2014)

Fading Gigolo is a film in which a soon to be impoverished man, Murray (Woody Allen), suggests to his friend Fioravante (John Turturro) that he become a gigolo, since Murray has already found some clients willing to use such services (Sharon Stone and Sofía Vergara). Fading Gigolo is not even nearly believable, but it is clear that this is not some kind of ballsy defiance of story-centric American cinema though less clear whether it is extreme narcissism or just simply unfocussed, unsure filmmaking.

There is also a storyline involving Fioravante’s burgeoning love affair with the widow of a Hassidic Rabbi, Avigal (Vanessa Paradis, playing the widow, not the rabbi). Fioravante brings Avigal out of her shell, but their relationship becomes complicated when Dovi (Liev Schreiber), who works for Shomrim, a civilian neighbourhood watch group, and who himself loves Avigal, begins to investigate Fioravante.

Fading Gigolo suggests first of all that Sharon Stone and Sofía Vergara would need to pay for sex. Then it suggests that they would willingly pay rather a large sum for sex with John Turturro – which is more odd since Turturro wrote it. This wasn’t such a problem since other films require a much greater stretching of one’s sense of disbelief – Spiderman, for instance. This isn’t a particularly overwhelming problem and it is easy to ignore if one decides not to be bothered by it. Indeed, this degree of male wish fulfilment is something of a staple in American comedies anyway, as Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and, even, Woody Allen films show.

The real problem with the film as far as its storyline is concerned is that it doesn’t seem planned in any way. In the opening moments, characters are introduced badly – as if Turturro’s main concern was avoiding bad exposition. Two characters (presumably Avigal’s children) are introduced without any context whatsoever – they don’t even seem to be in the same room as the action of the previous scene and they say nothing that suggests who they are or what their connection is with the rest of the film. Indeed, it takes a long time for Avigal’s role in the film to become clear and even then it seems unsure. Avigal visits Fioravante, presumably to use his services since Murray has set up the meeting, but all of a sudden it turns out she is only there for a massage, which Fioravante seems to have been expecting and is also fully capable of providing. Soon after they are in love. But it doesn’t seem to make any sense and it certainly doesn’t bare any relation to the whole ‘Fioravante as gigolo’ storyline. On top of that, Dovi never properly investigates Fioravante and he never finds out that he is a gigolo and neither does Avigal, so it all seems to go nowhere. Instead, Murray is investigated, arrested and tried but by then Turturro has introduced a whole new character (played by Bob Balaban) to sort everything out. Then Avigal declares her love for Dovi, without any prior indication that she even liked him and despite all of his rather unsavoury actions. Fading Gigolo feels like it never had more than one draft, the result of a writing exercise in which two outlandish and incompatible storylines are given and the writer has to make do as well as he might – one used, presumably, to teach them that there are limits to their abilities, a lesson John Turturro may not have appreciated.

All of that said however, Fading Gigolo is a comedy and since when did comedies have to make sense. Airplane and Monty Python and the Holy Grail certainly don’t. But both of those films are funny and Fading Gigolo isn’t – not once. The primary focus (initially at least) of the film is on the comedy between Fioravante and Murray, which is good but a little too much like a cheap Woody Allen imitation than the real thing. Casting Woody Allen here is a coup, but it doesn’t really work in the film’s favour since it only invites comparison to films that are much better. There is a secondary focus on Fioravante’s squeamishness about being a gigolo, although this is dropped almost immediately during his first encounter with Sharon Stone’s Dr Parker. All of a sudden, Fioravante is surprisingly good at being value for money. In fact, he’s suddenly an expert – hardly a fading gigolo at all. Then, Turturro decides that Fading Gigolo is a romantic film after all and he drops these scenes for a New York-advertising, sensual kind of filmmaking that is at odds with all of what has come before. The aforementioned massage scene goes on for much, much longer than it really needs to. And just as before Fioravante had suddenly become an expert gigolo, now he just as suddenly becomes an expert masseuse and an expert cook – neither skill established earlier in the film. It is hard not to wonder if the whole thing isn’t just some kind of vanity project from John Turturro, who just wanted to make a film in which he starred as a hyper-capable, incredibly knowledgeable and extremely cultured romantic lead, who gets to have all sorts of love scenes with a variety of attractive actresses.

Fading Gigolo doesn’t make much sense and it is laughably narcissistic in a way that could be forgiven if it wasn’t so unashamedly so. But its major crime is that it isn’t funny when it really could have been. It is a film of wasted potential, with an awkward, lazy tone and no fully developed characters.

REVIEW: Blue Jasmine (2013)

Blue Jasmine is Woody Allen’s 45^th feature film and arguably his first to deal with the contemporary world in any real way. It is also his best-reviewed film in quite a while with most of the praise going to Cate Blanchett’s lead performance.

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is down on her luck. Once rich and married to successful businessman Hal (Alec Baldwin), she lived a full and vacuous life as one of the 1% in New York’s affluent Park Avenue. Following Hal’s arrest for all sorts of business fraud, Jasmine is left alone and broke. After a nervous breakdown, she moves to San Francisco to live with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who she has had little to do with since childhood. The film follows her as she tries to get used to working for a meagre living and as she tries get again to snare a rich husband. Meanwhile, she constantly berates her sister for her lack of ambition and choice in men – taking a particular dislike to Ginger’s fiancé Chili (Bobby Cannavale).

As is evident, Allen is in a sombre mood, making a serious film for the first time since the grim but interesting 2010 film You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The film begins with Jasmine at a very low point in her life and only briefly lightens up along the way, the drama heightened by frequent, well-integrated flashbacks of Jasmine’s time with Hal. These flashbacks are always introduced seamlessly into the narrative and frequently comment on the action, Allen’s movement between these modes displaying again his editorial skills as both a writer and director. The film unfolds well, saving certain backstory revelations until they can have their strongest, or cruellest, effect – particularly when it reveals what happened Hal after his arrest and why Ginger and her ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) detest him so much. As is often the case, Allen shows himself to be a fantastic storyteller, very much aware of when to come in and out of a scene and displaying a deft hand at exposition, nuance, character and music. The use of “Blue Moon” as a symbol of Jasmine’s traumatic disconnect from a highly romanticised past is perfect and, in the final scene, simply but powerfully moving. Jasmine is not a nice character but Blanchett’s incisive performance and Allen’s equally insightful script make her human and thoroughly understandable.

The film’s main problem lies in its contemporary relevance. Allen has thus far largely avoided making points on current affairs, making films that, at their best, feel effortlessly timeless. A film like Shadows and Fog is able to reach a large degree of theological and philosophical depth precisely because it has no contemporary relevance whatsoever and oftentimes Allen’s best films work in a similar vacuum. Similarly Blue Jasmine is thwarted slightly by a representation of the working class San Franciscans that is all beer, vests and sports on TV and not much of a stretch from Danny Aiello’s detestable, abusive Monk in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But while Monk was a character from the 1930s, Augie and Chili merely feel anachronistically like characters from the same decade. Allen has made a career of mocking the characteristics and peccadilloes of privileged pseudo-intellectual New Yorkers and it is admirable that he is trying to show the 99% for once. It is just a pity that he does not invest these characters with any depth. Augie and Chili too often feel like caricatures (something Allen often opts for too easily) and when they do not, it is easy to suspect that this is thanks more to Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Cannavale than to Woody Allen. Here, like Jasmine, Allen might have found himself in a world he does not understand.

Though itself tainted by Jasmine’s snobbery, Blue Jasmine is nonetheless a well-made drama with uniformly good performances and a further example of Allen’s talent for writing quick and believable scripts and directing complex and interesting dramas.


See also:
Midnight in Paris
To Rome With Love

REVIEW: To Rome With Love (2012)

To Rome With Love is this year’s Woody Allen film and his first since the surprise success of Midnight in Paris. Woody Allen has a chequered critical history, though his recent bad reputation is hardly justified. Consistent throughout his films, from the “early funny ones” to the unfairly derided late ones, is a willingness to try new things, though always within a recognisable framework. His late films have ranged from bleak morality fables (Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream) to whimsical and enjoyable entertainments (Whatever Works and Midnight in Paris) or those with elements of both (Anything Else, Melinda and Melinda, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger), but all have a slightly experimental edge. To Rome With Love is very much a part of the latter category and it is very enjoyable.

The film is made up of four unrelated stories, all set along different timelines, but all introduced by a traffic warden (Pierluigi Marchionne). What follows is a potted summary, which will do the film no favours, but the less you know going in the better. Hayley (Alison Pill, Zelda Fitzgerald in Midnight In Paris) is an American tourist, who becomes engaged to Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti). When their parents meet, things happen. Newlyweds Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) and Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) arrive in Rome for a honeymoon, but Milly gets lost, forcing Antonio to find a substitute for a series of business meetings. Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) wakes up one morning to find out that he is suddenly and for no apparent reason famous. Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), an architecture student, invites John (Alec Baldwin), a middle-aged architect, back to his house. John observes Jack’s romantic confusion when his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig) invites her friend Monica (Ellen Page) to stay.

To Rome With Love flits through each story at a fast pace, which means that the film does not linger too long on any of them. Admittedly, two of them have their duller stretches and none of them would have withstood a feature length treatment. The stories are reminiscent of Allen’s short prose, collected in “Getting Even”, “Without Feathers” and “Side Effects”, whimsical little pieces that are enjoyable and often funny but, crucially, don’t outstay their welcome. As a compilation of stories, To Rome With Love is quite a success. Each story has enough surprises and enough laughs to keep them interesting and two of them are particularly good – the Alison Pill storyline and the Jesse Eisenberg/Alec Baldwin ones. As a whole, the film is thoroughly enjoyable, but also really rather charming in an old fashioned way.

Ultimately, Woody Allen offers something that Hollywood has not managed to make in quite a while – films whose sole raison d’etre is the audiences’ amusement. It recalls films like The Thin Man series and Top Hat and the films of the Marx Brothers, movies that exist only to entertain and to cheer us up. By comparison, the Hollywood of today has become cynical. Filmmaking is not about enjoyment anymore, but about the money. To Rome With Love is intentionally, even gleefully, out of place. Neither does it have the resonance of Annie Hall or Manhattan or Crimes and Misdemeanours or even You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, but it is remarkably capable of making you leave the cinema with a smile on your face, even despite your own better judgement. It is disposable, but why is that such a bad thing if the film is so entertaining?

To Rome With Love has good ideas - the narrative device involving Alec Baldwin is fun and intriguing in equal measure – some great performances, clever plotting and a good ear for music and scenery. It is too easy to dismiss it as a throwaway travelogue but as a piece of pleasant, good-natured entertainment, it is a satisfying little gem.

REVIEW: Midnight In Paris (2011)

  Midnight In Paris is this year’s Woody Allen film in which Owen Wilson takes the role Allen is now too old to play. It is a light comedy full of quietly funny scenes and a fantastical premise that it is best not to know anything about going in.

  Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a successful Hollywood hack writer who wants to drop everything and move to Paris and work on his first novel. He is also deeply nostalgic for 1920s Paris. His fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) would rather that he grow up and embrace success and modernity. Choosing to forgo the many social engagements that Inez tries to drag him into, Gil prefers to wander the streets of Paris where, on the stroke of midnight, something odd happens.

  The phrase ‘return to form’ has been used with each subsequent Allen film since 2008’s fantastic Vicky Christina Barcelona; but the truth is that it hasn’t been a bad decade for the prolific writer-director. With Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Scoop to the more recent Whatever Works and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Allen has made a collection of pleasantly surprising, and often funny, films, whether light or dark in tone. With Midnight In Paris, it is made abundantly clear that he has cornered the market in cheerfully breezy comedies, held together by good, amusing ideas. He doesn’t waste time delving into the intricacies of his fantasy plot, to the point that Gil very quickly accepts the strange environment in which he finds himself. Allen isn’t interested in whether this could actually happen. What concerns him, like in his much earlier Sleeper, is working with the idea he has and developing it in several unexpected but very pleasing ways. To use any of them as examples would be to ruin the fun but, for the sake of critical analysis, they are, for example, the PI’s unfortunate wrong turning and Luis Buñuel’s inability to understand Gil’s movie idea as well as Michael Sheen’s arrogant Paul, Adrien Brody’s Dali or Corey Stoll’s mad, almost unblinking Hemingway. This list could go on and on.

  This light tone pervades the film, even in the rather long opening montage of Paris, which shows the city from morning until night. It will no doubt have many critics sneering at the tourist’s eye view of Paris, but it fits the mood of the film absolutely. After all, the film is about a tourist celebrating his idea of Paris, as well as the worth of nostalgia and whether or not it is merely a denial of the present.

  Though it does deal with a variety of neuroses, it is a film to enjoy and not to take seriously. Ultimately, light-hearted Woody Allen films fall out of a lot of critical criteria because of their whimsical nature. They are not like other films. They are simple little films which don’t take themselves too seriously and which don’t ask you to either. They have their flaws but, in the end, they are little joys filled with great performances and well-used music.