Woody’s latest comedy stiff and distancing
Advertisement
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Digital Subscription
One year of digital access for only $205*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*First annual payment billed as $205.00 + GST for one year. This annual subscription will automatically renew at $233.00 + GST every 52 weeks (10% off the regular annual price of $259.35). Offer available to new and qualified returning subscribers only. Cancel any time.
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Add Free Press access to your Brandon Sun subscription for only an additional
$1 for the first 4 weeks*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*Your next Brandon Sun subscription payment will increase by $1.00 and you will be charged $17.95 plus GST for four weeks. After four weeks, your payment will increase to $24.95 plus GST every four weeks.
Read unlimited articles for free today:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/11/2010 (5810 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
You would think writer-director Woody Allen would be the last guy to make a movie to lampoon the vanity of an old guy who abandons his older wife to take up with a much younger woman.
But lampoon he does, albeit gently. The older man is Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), a London magnate who believes that since he feels young, he should marry someone young and sexy.
There is irony here, but it is irony at arm’s length. Allen intends his audience should keep its distance from any notions that You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger reflects his own experience. Since Allen left his New York base (where he made more enduring comedies Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters) for London, his films have been correspondingly removed from the milieu of New York intellectuals and artists he once called home.
That distance is keenly felt here. Allen announces his theme as delusion with the song over the opening credits: When You Wish Upon a Star. And as each character is marked by varying degrees of delusion, it’s difficult to get onside with anybody.
Alfie’s wife Helen (Gemma Jones), shattered by her husband’s abandonment, takes to consulting the psychic Cristal (Pauline Collins), who consoles her with prediction that a new love is just around the corner.
That’s OK with Helen’s daughter Sally (Naomi Watts), who reasons Cristal’s soothing con is keeping her mom from suicide. Anyway, Sally has enough trouble with her husband Roy (Josh Brolin), who is too busy completing his new novel to gratify Sally’s desire for a child. Sally starts to contemplate starting anew with her employer, the unhappily married art gallery owner (Antonio Banderas).
Correspondingly, Roy begins his own flirtation with the beautiful flutist (Frieda Pinto of Slumdog Millionaire) across the courtyard from his apartment. She passes a test of some kind when Roy tells her he’s watched her undress and she doesn’t get thoroughly creeped out.
Actually, the least delusional character in the film is arguably Alfie’s disastrous new wife Charmaine (played to the hilt by Lucy Punch, last seen as Paul Rudd’s sexually psychotic stalker in Dinner with Shmucks), a call girl who views Alfie as a human ATM. Grasping, carnal, tasteless and dim, Charmaine is perversely the most enjoyable character in the movie, much as Mira Sorvino was as the porn star in Allen’s 1995 comedy Mighty Aphrodite.
That may be a sign that Allen is borrowing from his past. An exchange in which the younger Roy woos Sally by massaging her strained metatarsal is lifted almost word for word from Allen’s 1982 A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, a film which pitted Allen’s open-minded inventor against José Ferrer’s joyless empiricist academic on the existence of supernatural phenomena.
Philosophically, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger sees Allen flip allegiances, taking up the Ferrer character’s mockery of anything you can’t see, hear, touch, taste or smell.
The result is precisely as much fun as it sounds.
randall.king@freepress.mb.ca
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
MovieReview
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Starring Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin and Anthony Hopkins
Globe
PG
Two stars out of five
Other Voices
Selected excerpts from reviews of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
Woody refuses to burn out or fade away, opting instead to simply become irrelevant.
— Serena Donadoni, Metro Times
Much of the writing is good, and the acting is superb, but the constant wrangling wore me out at times.
— David Denby, New Yorker
I couldn’t get away from these shrill, complaining people fast enough.
— Kimberly Jones, Austin Chronicle
A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance, mystery or justification for its existence…
— Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel
— Compiled by Shane Minkin
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Advertisement Advertise With Us
