Woody’s latest comedy stiff and distancing

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This article was published 05/11/2010 (5770 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