It never fails. Every time a new Woody Allen movie comes out the bulk of the critical discussion surrounding it is about where it fits into the canon of Woody films. Is this just a minor Woody film, or might we consider it one of his mythic “great films”? And which of his past works do you consider part of that pantheon? For the last six films or so you might also throw in some commentary about what is gained or lost by Woody not shooting in his home of New York. Is this a new man reinvigorated by his European surroundings or are we dealing with an authentically New York voice that just can’t recreate the same manic energy in a different setting? I can never much engage in these sorts of conversations because Woody Allen is, for me, admittedly kind of a blind spot. I’d go as far as to say that I just don’t get the Woody Allen thing. I’ve seen a handful of his big ones, I’ve seen Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters and I’ve seen a handful of his more modern films that people consider the works of a past his prime filmmaker, and for the life of me I just can’t tell the difference. There are things he does well, for sure. His casting and work with actors is always exceptional. His dialogue is unmistakable. But I don’t see where the talk of greatness comes from. Each of his films spotlights privileged, dysfunctional liberals and the trials and tribulations of their shallow, dysfunctional relationships. They hem, they haw, they naval gaze, and generally we get some sort of cynical moral to wrap things up. Rinse and repeat. So, why then will people lament that fact that this film doesn’t reach the heights of those great Woody Allen films of years past when it does all the same things? Great cast of talented actors? Check. Neurotic portrayals of dysfunctional relationships? Check. What do those films have that this one doesn’t? The answer may be lost on me, but it’s clear that it isn’t lost on everyone. I guess the thing that we can all agree on is that it’s getting to be about time for Woody to slow down on the production of these films. Why has this man, at his age, kept on churning out these variations on the same theme, with seemingly diminishing returns, once a year for as long as we can remember? That’s why the talk about canon becomes unavoidable when writing about Woody’s works. At this point, for such a prolific career, questions of legacy can’t help but come to the forefront. What does this large collection of mediocre films sitting at the end of the man’s filmography do to his legacy? Does it spoil his accomplishments for us to see so many of these diminished shadows of past great works over and over again? I don’t think so, but maybe that’s because I’m just not one of the man’s fans. I think it’s clear that the criticism he currently gets is not based out of any sort of spite or malice, but instead out of a protective instinct for those past Woody films that people have fallen in love with. It feels a bit like Woody is a factory that hasn’t shut down production even though the company went out of business six months ago. Maybe what he needs is simply for somebody in charge to come in and shut out the lights. Or maybe he’s just a fan of cinema who likes shooting movies and we should all mind our business and let the man do his thing until he starts putting out things that are actually bad.
As per usual, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is more about characters than it is about story. We are first introduced to Helena (Gemma Jones), a retiree who is reeling after being left by her husband Alfie (Anthony Hopkins). Wounded, neurotic, and even a bit alcoholic, Helena is a woman who is in great need of a little piece of mind. Horrified at thoughts of his own mortality, Alfie is in need of recapturing a sense of his lost youth. Helena sets out to accomplish her goals by regularly seeing a psychic; Alfie takes a slightly different path by obsessively exercising and getting remarried to a ditzy young call girl named Charmaine (Lucy Punch). We’re also introduced to Alfie and Helena’s daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) who is having marriage woes with her husband Roy (Josh Brolin), a failing writer, due to his inability to finish and sell his second novel. He is generating no income, forcing the couple to live off of Helena’s alimony checks, and shows little interest in starting a family despite how much the idea means to Sally. Due to the constant friction between the two both of their eyes start to wander, Roy’s to a fetching young woman in red across the alleyway named Dia (Freida Pinto) that he watches through his bedroom window, and Sally to her dashing, art gallery owning boss Greg (Antonio Banderas). We watch as the four main characters struggle to replace the things in their lives that they perceive as broken with other things that are shiny and new. With this comes happiness. Or at least that’s the plan. As things play out, searching for something new can often consist of a lot of selfish, immature decision making and deceitful, cruel action taking. And instead of rewarding them with happy endings, Woody makes his characters suffer for their indiscretions.
Just like in most of Allen’s pictures, the cast performs admirably and the strength of the film lies in their performances. Gemma Jones is expressive and full of energy as the manic, gullible Helena. Crushed from her divorce, Helena has attempted suicide when we first meet her. In order to give her life some sort of meaning, or at least a bit of distraction, Sally sends her to a charlatan of a fortuneteller named Cristal. At first things seem to work like a charm, Helena takes great comfort in Cristal’s predictions of future good fortune, but later on in the film Helena becomes so under the spell of Cristal and her visions that it starts to add to the tension in Sally and Roy’s relationship. Every decision made needs to first be run by Cristal. Every loan the couple needs to get from Helena must first be verified as a good idea by the cards and the stars or whatever mumbo jumbo Cristal serves up each week. Helena is a character so dense and so oblivious that it seems as though she should be overbearing and obnoxious, but Jones plays her with enough charm and vulnerability that you can’t help but find her eccentricities amusing. In the hands of a lesser actress I probably would have been reaching at the screen trying to strangle Helena every time that she appears on screen, but when brought to life by Jones I couldn’t help but smirk every time she threw back a swig of whiskey and insulted Roy’s career prospects.
Not to be outdone, Hopkins matches Jones scene for scene in the injecting his character with spark and life category. And in his case the feat might be even a bit more impressive as his character isn’t just a buffoon; he can be self absorbed, destructive, and cruel in the way he treats people as well. While explaining away his divorce from his wife he quips, “she allowed herself to get old”. He never stops to think about the pain or embarrassment he is causing his family as he parades around town with his new trollop of a bride, a woman no older than his daughter. And his second marriage itself, that to a gold digging prostitute, is such a poorly thought out, immature act one could hardly imagine it being performed by anyone other than the most miserable of film characters. But Hopkins is always able to keep you on his side, always rooting for him to come out on top in the end. Sure his character goes about his goals in completely the wrong fashion, but in his portrayal of Alfie Hopkins seems to be channeling Jack Lemmon in some of his more iconic performances from films like The Apartment and Glengarry Glen Ross. He’s always hustlin’, always trying to make ends meet. He moves forward meeting his failures with a sheepish grin and a shrug of the shoulders that keeps him from ever being unlikable. For a more modern reference, he is old Gil from The Simpsons, himself a caricature of Jack Lemmon, always reaching for that brass ring and always falling short. This is the most fun I’ve seen Hopkins have on screen in years and even his questionable relationship with Charmaine is a delight to watch play out as Lucy Punch delivers the most explicitly comedic performance in the film and she and Hopkins fall into an easy rhythm and become something of a delightful comedic team over the course of the film; her classless and oblivious and him breathlessly trying to keep up.
Naomi Watts is, as is probably expected by those who have followed her work, awesome in this. On page I wouldn’t call Sally the most defined character I’ve ever seen. She wants a family, she wants to someday own her own art gallery, she wants to sleep with her boss; but we’re never really given a glimpse into who she is. Sally is a character defined only by her desires. And despite this, Watts finds just the right moments to lend gravity to those desires and make something of them. For much of the film she is stoic and subdued, but there are a couple key scenes where her emotions begin to show through her face; usually when one of her desires is being denied to her. Her restraint through most of the film works to spotlight these moments and add to their effectiveness. On the page I imagine the character of Sally looked something like a ghost, just a nag for Roy to rebel against, just a sounding board for Helena to point her crazy at; but Watts is able through sheer force of talent and will to make her feel human and crucial. This is one of the few times that I’ve been struck while watching a performance by just how little acting is going on. Watts makes this performance stand out simply by living in the moment with her character, even when nothing particularly interesting is happening to her, and never falling into the trap of over acting to make up for a lack of focus from the filmmakers. I take that as a sign of Watts being a true professional at her craft and I really appreciated what she did here.
Roy, as portrayed by Josh Brolin, is absolutely grotesque. His head looks huge crowned with a mop of poofy hair, he’s carrying an extra twenty pounds on his frame; he’s lumbering and stupid. I hated him every second that he was on screen and this is an actor who I’ve absolutely loved in things before. The way he disappears into this boorish oaf is truly commendable. Roy is selfish, lazy, and untalented. And yet we’re told that he threw away a promising career in medicine in order to thrust his uninspired writing upon the world. He’s jealous of his more gifted friends, unappreciative of his wife’s desires, and utterly self centered in everything that he does. He comes up with lame excuses to get out of working day jobs, is completely content to live off of his mother in law’s money, and seems to resent others because of how their gaze reflects his own failures. Knowing him is a burden. He is an anchor around his family’s necks. And once he approaches the girl across the street and she is inexplicably attracted to him, he willingly puts himself around her neck as well, despite the fact that she is engaged and has a promising future in front of her. It is this act that ultimately makes him irredeemable, even more so than cheating on his wife or stealing a dead man’s book and trying to pass it off as his own. Those were crimes that were ultimately victimless as the dead are unaware of being wronged and Sally would be better off without him anyways. But here is something beautiful that he is willfully ruining by thrusting himself upon it. And that is about all Freida Pinto is asked to do here as Dia, be beautiful and blossoming and unaware of the corruption that is in store for her. Hopkins plays his character as oblivious and insecure and consequently we are unable to hold him accountable for many of his crimes. Brolin plays Roy as calculating and aware. He mulls over his decisions, understands what their consequences will be, and still opts to do the wrong thing. They are two different approaches to portraying characters that are cads, they have different results, but they both are very effective.
When compared to the performances, which are universally strong, the rest of the nuts and bolts of the film are more hit and miss. The story is told to us through a detached narrator whose inclusion I found to be unnecessary and distracting. Never is there a plot point or an insight into a character that is given to us by the narrator that wouldn’t have been more subtly and effectively conveyed by trusting the actors to give them to us through their performances. The voice over felt pandering and like a screenwriting short cut. The characters’ dialogue could be viewed as a positive or a negative. The way the characters talk to each other was, quite frankly, a little mundane. Nowhere does the script get particularly funny or particularly insightful. These are the same privileged, liberal, artsy characters that Woody has been writing about for his entire career, but they sound more like everyday schmoes than they did in his past work. Gone is the “everybody is talking like Woody” trope that his scripts had become known for. Perhaps this could be viewed as a positive, a maturing of Woody’s writing process and evidence that he is able to craft more than just a small handful of character archetypes. I can see that, and I can get behind it, but ultimately I would argue that the results of this newfound subtlety just aren’t very compelling to watch. Maybe this is what people are talking about when they negatively compare Allen’s modern works to those from his prime. That unmistakable Woody Allen voice could be exactly what people love and exactly what they are attached to in Woody’s films. For me, I never really bought into the whole dog and pony show as something “great”, but at least it’s more memorable than what we get in this film.
One thing that Woody still does very well is the way in which he constructs, blocks, and shoots his scenes. There was one scene in particular that stood out to me as being an outstanding showcase of what Woody has to offer as a filmmaker. Roy’s second novel has been rejected by his publisher and both Sally and Helena are with him when he gets the news. The three characters lyrically interact with each other in an almost dancelike fashion. The camera moves between them, never cutting, and adding to the stage show routine. The scene must have been a nightmare to plan and it is performed flawlessly. Each of these characters is so self involved that they have become planets unto themselves. They look so thoroughly inward that they have created cores of selfishness that have their own gravity. Never do these people connect with one another or bond in any way. If you get them in a room together they all just thoughtlessly revolve around one another, sometimes attracting and sometimes repelling one another due to their self possessed gravitational fields. Even though they share a space they converse with themselves more so than they do with each other. And when things really get cooking Woody is able to present the interactions so well that dialogue becomes action sequence.
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger [Blu-ray]
