All that jazz

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This article was published 29/07/2016 (3648 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Woody Allen thinks “nostalgia is a trap,” describing it in a 2011 interview as “a pleasant, sticky substance, like honey.”

Prepare to get stuck in with Allen’s latest, a sad, slight and very nostalgic romantic drama.

Bobby Dorfman (The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg) is our Bronx-born, Depression-era Allen stand-in, whose ill-timed love for Vonnie (Kristen Stewart of the Twilight franchise) forms the film’s wispy plot. Narrated by the now 80-year-old Allen, the story feels awash in nostalgia for an imagined and insular 1930s, for Fred and Ginger in Hollywood, for Lindy’s cheesecake in Manhattan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGRNkrvh1Dg

Allen’s 47th feature also offers another kind of nostalgia, as fans look back to Woody’s own golden age in the 1970s, when American films were intelligent, aimed at adults and filled with references to French existentialism. Café Society is pleasant enough, with intriguing performances, intermittently smart and funny dialogue, and gorgeously burnished cinematography from Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro, but it feels flimsy. It’s the trap of nostalgia that will draw audiences, even if they get only glimpses of Allen’s ‘70s genius.

Bobby heads to Hollywood, hoping to work for his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a high-powered, name-dropping agent who’s perpetually on the phone. (It’s a rotary phone, but somehow he manages.) Phil hires Bobby as an errand boy, asking his secretary Veronica, nicknamed Vonnie, to show him around town.

Bobby falls hard and fast and tries to convince Vonnie to move to New York with him. When work and love both fail, he heads back east, seemingly walking into Allen’s Radio Days (1987), as his close, working-class Jewish family bickers and kvetches in an overheated walk-up apartment. The film feels abruptly cut in half.

Bobby starts working at the high-society nightclub owned by his amiable thug of a brother, Ben (Corey Stoll), who tends to find, uh, physical solutions to his problems. (Here Allen cuts to what seem like slapstick re-enactments of old-timey gangster flicks.) Ben intervenes in a dispute between his brother-in-law, a nebbishy intellectual, and a belligerent neighbour, a barely sketched-in subplot that echoes Crimes and Misdemeanors, probably Allen’s last great film.

Expect glamour and jazz and really fabulous satin dresses, as Bobby works the club floor, shmoozing with politicians and playboys, stars and socialites, mobsters and molls — though an anecdote about Errol Flynn and his underage cuties just feels oogy. Bobby starts a new romance with Blake Lively, who’s also named Veronica — how convenient! — while still thinking about her predecessor.

Allen returns to many of his favourite themes — choice and chance, youth and age, love and death — though these feel less like fully developed ideas and more like intellectual status symbols, tossed around the same way Uncle Phil throws out the names of Joan Crawford or Gary Cooper.

While the Jewish jokes are mostly ancient Borscht Belt, other ways of talking seem jarringly contemporary. (Did anyone say “disproportionate response” or “addictive personality” in the 1930s?)

This is partly because Allen increasingly sees his characters primarily as extensions of himself. Eisenberg is the most obvious proxy, of course, with his wonderfully nervy, neurotic delivery. But there’s also the Carell part — originally cast with Bruce Willis — the worldly older man to whom beautiful, unformed young women are inexplicably drawn, and the philosopher brother-in-law, always chiming in about the essential meaninglessness of the universe.

The women are, of course, ciphers, though if you’re going for an enigmatic love object, Stewart’s intriguing onscreen introversion is actually a nice fit. (In a scene where Bobby and Vonnie go on a tour of Beverly Hills’ overgrown celebrity homes, she says “I’d be happier being life-sized,” possibly a comment on Stewart’s own prickly relationship with fame.)

The film manages a slight melancholy tug, and Woody’s recent tendency to stop suddenly actually works here, underlining the characters’ impossible romantic dilemmas. But the script is often lazy and listless, solipsistic without being particularly self-aware.

In Café Society, Allen namechecks philosophers but seems too tired to take their advice. “Socrates says the unexamined life is not worth living,” as one character says. “But the examined one is no bargain.”

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca