(for Tall Dark Stranger)
Ninth in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave
New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop
(and political) culture
Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
[Edit 10/9/14. Edit 10/11/14. Edits 10/13/14.]
This two-part entry combines
reviews of two films, not historically contiguous ones as I usually try to do
in a two-film review with Allen. Partly for logistical reasons, I am reviewing
these two together in view of how, not far apart in release dates, they both
use elaborate plots (or story-structures) that allow Allen to manage a large
cast of varied actors/characters and operate without one neat, unified plot.
(This also leads me to look at two of his films in two different decades, as I’ve
been classing them.)
But You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) works better as a sort of
multi-situation, multi-group story that deals with themes related to “the
larger life cycle,” which slightly puts it in a league with Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) (more
exactly, Hannah deals with the coming
and going of love over years, and this partly with regard to family
interrelations; Tall Dark Stranger
deals with love in relation to the recognition of being later in life or near
the end of life, and less regarding family relations, though as a mechanical
thing, they still add to the plot).
Meanwhile, To Rome with Love (2012) is more a collection of “little stories,”
incorporating (in one of them) some of what a critic has called the “magical
realism” he’s used at times (such as, early on, with The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985]). To Rome seems to work less well overall,
but is still quite entertaining (sporadically) in a light way, as Tall Dark Stranger isn’t quite.
Subsections below:
Multiple characters in a fancy story mostly about seeking mates
An elderly couple is a thematic pacesetter
A younger couple seems to have an edgier story
The one American has his eye on an Indian in a neighboring house
The film’s tone is milder than some comic aspects (potential) of the
relationship developments
Some ironies and oddities about the casting
Two years in the future…
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (TDS) is on the theme of finding meaning and hope in older age—it is
a “middle-aged person’s film,” very
generally in the way of the Coen brothers’ Burning After Reading (2008)—and generally in this regard, it would
seem “of a piece” with Allen’s Whatever
Works (2009), which I reviewed here.
But TDS is very different from that
latter film, most broadly in that WW
is based on an old script of Allen’s (and not a first-rate one at that) and
hence WW goes for relatively easy
laughs (and some on the sophomoric side) (and it not-rarely works in that
regard), while TDS is written by
Allen recently, and is a good example of late
Allen. TDS is written for adults,
competently produced, and with clear-eyed photography, and also is another work
made in Europe (which would seem to conduce to his for-adults production ends);
but TDS is not a great example of his films, but also doesn’t usually pose the kind
of issues that would rile Allen haters.
Hence, it doesn’t help to say
where it would stand for Allen fans, versus
those casually interested in Allen, versus
Allen haters. Rather, I would like to
look at how it works well (or well enough), and then set aside a subsection
focusing on what is rather unintentionally amusing about the film—not that
these latter aspects are bluntly flatulent; rather, they are results of the
ways Allen tends to make films in his last two decades, as results in some mild
ironies at the least. (I offer some general methods Allen seems to follow,
based on reasonable inferences from looks at his films from my own layperson perspective,
at the end of this entry.)
Multiple characters in a fancy story mostly about seeking mates
Tall Dark Stranger was Woody Allen’s
fifth film made in Europe. He’d made four in a
row from Match Point (2005) to Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), then
made Whatever Works in New York. TDS was made using the producing help of
Mediapro, which was the Spanish company
behind Vicky Cristina Barcelona (see
my review here). But while Mediapro (see End note) was at Allen’s side again, this film was made in Britain,
with a mostly British cast (a British producer for this film is Nicky Kentish
Barnes).
(Note: The inevitability of visits from the Grim Reaper—in this film,
alluded to as a “tall, dark stranger”—that Allen so often cites, shows up in
the fact that Charles H. Joffe, who died in 2008, could no longer be listed as
among Allen’s long-time executive producers; only Jack Rollins remains.)
And while the cast is generally
good in terms of an actor-personality’s being lined up with a character-personality,
to me the one casting oddity—which makes for one of the biggest unintentional
(but kindly) laughs of the film—is having Josh Brolin on hand in a milieu that would otherwise seem, at least in surface respects,
entirely British. Brolin’s presence seems, from a marketing angle, to be a way
to have the film appeal to U.S. audiences; but his being an American—with, in
limited ways, a particularly American sort of swagger and “determined chin” in
this film—along with the comical situation he plays out (not least as an author
of books trying to get somewhere with a fourth book, after his heady success
with his first book), makes Brolin’s character seem like one of the decidedly less
respectable ones here (though it’s unclear how much Allen intended this, i.e.,
to make Roy an object of farce). This is, arguably Brolin and his character are
definitely an odd duck in this film’s constellation of actors/characters and
thematic concerns; I’ll look more later at how inadvertent this is, or not.
TDS is well shot by Vilmos Zsigmond,
working for Allen for the first time since Cassandra’s
Dream (2007-08). Again, the elegant and unobtrusive camerawork helps the
film seem very competently done; notice in the several scenes in Roy’s and
Sally’s apartment how Zsigmond seems to use a SteadyCam to shift between shots
of figures as they move in and out of rooms. The simplicity of the spatial
situation seems enlivened by the characters’ movement and coming into different
combinations in different rooms or doorways. This, as well as other beautifully
shot situations (such as in the English gardens that, by now, Allen makes the
most of in his British-shot films), means this film is very pleasant to look
at, which goes hand in hand with the competent enough acting.
Let me look at the story
somewhat broadly, and how the film appeals (or doesn’t). (Allen gets a bit hip with
TDS by having, as the music under his
initial titles, Leon Redbone singing “When
You Wish Upon a Star.” I once got a Leon Redbone album back in the early 1980s,
when he was hip as a strangely, self-consciously retro sort of musician. How,
today, he fits into Allen’s musical choices over the long term is a little odd,
in that Allen prefers stuff that isn’t just self-consciously retro, but is “retro”
for simply being old.)
An elderly couple is a thematic pacesetter
There are several interrelated
couples and varying potentials for growing or newly forming relationships. Helena
Shepridge (Gemma Jones) is an elderly
woman who (after a 40-year marriage) has been divorced from her husband Alfie
Shepridge (Anthony Hopkins, seeming to
carry his role with occasional slight troubles pronouncing his lines, while his
sheer masterly presence makes his character “come off,” even though his
character is a not-terribly-likable one falling under the rubric of “There’s no
fool like an old fool”). Alfie has suddenly gotten into a panic over aging (he
also has been frustrated in having had his son die at a young age, and lately he
wants a son, along with his already-adult daughter), and he has gotten into
exercise, tanning…and drove his wife into distraction (she tries suicide as is
narrated at one point).
Yes, a narrator helps us through
this story, but the narration isn’t as conspicuous as in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Helena then becomes obsessed with going
to a fortune teller (Pauline Collins) to
see what her future holds. She is desperate to have another life partner after Alfie.
She stands, in Allen’s set of themes here, for the person who is so afraid to
face death alone that she will believe in a silly pseudoscience, practiced in
her life by a person called by others a charlatan, to have some security about
her future.
Alfie, for his part, seeks out
“a younger self” by, as it turns out, taking up with a prostitute, Charmaine (Lucy Punch—the actress’s name seems almost hard
to believe, and you wonder why it isn’t the prostitute’s). This woman has a
sort of Cockney accent that I couldn’t determine was partly put on; she sounds
ludicrously beyond Alfie’s social station, yet he is determined to have a
productive relationship with her, and as the narrator shows, in this sub-story
is an element of a variation on Allen’s theme of “The heart wants what it
wants”—repeated sexual relations with Charmaine lead to his developing a
further, less carnal love for her. All in all, Alfie’s story—which is often
scored to playful ragtime-type music as if to underscore what a focus of somewhat-unsympathetic
comedy he is—is mildly amusing but arguably the shallowest story here, with the
prostitute theme not nearly as charming or moderately edifying as it is in,
say, Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995).
A younger couple seems to have an edgier story
More a focus of the story, there
is Sally (Naomi Watts) and Roy (full name,
Royal Channing; played by Josh Brolin). Sally is Alfie and Helena’s daughter,
their remaining child. She has relationship challenges of her own. She wants to
have children, but is held off in this by Roy’s pursuing a career (which
inherently comes with financial insecurity) as a writer of apparent
bestseller-type fiction; he started with an initial big hit, but on his fourth
book, seems to be proving to be a one-hit-book wonder. Making him look more a
bit of a clown, he had gone to medical school, but had decided on graduating to
not become a doctor but to pursue a fiction writer’s life instead. (He met
Sally in a park able to give her advice about a sprained ankle based on his
recent med school knowledge. Later, they are snuggling in a park with his quoting
a William Carlos Williams poem about the red wheelbarrow beside the white
chickens.)
Sally has to work at a gallery,
where she works under Greg Clemente (Antonio Banderas),
whom she develops love for, though he ends up simultaneously having an affair
with Sally’s protégé at work. Sally does this work to support herself and Roy
while he struggles with his ongoing book project; she is frustrated because she
wants to start having children, wishing Roy would work at something more
gainful. Meanwhile, her mother has helped with the rent.
This outlines the starting
situations of two couples, which may all sound a bit like soap opera; certainly
the humor isn’t uproarious. The themes here that are familiar to Allen
followers are not pursued with more originality in his earlier works. As a film
that seems to echo Hannah and Her Sisters
(as I suggested early on), TDS
certainly seems on the wan side. When I first watched TDS, I thought (for purposes of joking in this review) that it had
been directed by a robot version of Allen—or maybe a variation on the robot he
played in Sleeper, meaning a real
robot, not his character pretending to be one. But this film seemed so pleasant
and competently produced, with only Alfie’s story really being on the tacky
side, that on watching it again, I found it more worth looking at (and
appreciating for its details) than had been the case at first.
The one American has his eye on an Indian in a neighboring house
Another subplot that also seems
a little less than credible, or makes the character look a little over-goofy
(in addition to Alfie’s), is Roy’s
being intrigued by the attractive woman who plays music, classical stuff on a
guitar, across the courtyard between their flats. Each a few floors up (and on
equivalent floors), he speaks to her across the courtyard, and eventually gets
to meet her for lunch. Though he is aware she has a male companion, and she
tells him that male is her fiance, he shows he is driven to have her be his girlfriend.
This apple of Roy’s eye is Dia, a young Asian-Indian woman (Freida Pinto), and their meeting for lunch at a restaurant is
nicely written (on a technical level) and shot.
While I admire how technically
this scene is done, I have questions about how much afoul of normal cultural
assumptions Roy’s “hitting on” Dia is. Obviously, his muscling in on a
relationship where she already has a fiancé seems gauche at best; but for Asian
Indians like Dia, not least in Britain, wouldn’t this seem so barbaric as to
scare away any normal romantic interest? Allen seems to have no problem setting
up this kind of interpersonal development in his U.S.-set films, where it has
seemed more plausible (if still raising questions from some) since all the way
back to Manhattan (1979). With this situation transplanted to Britain,
I really wonder—without having even visited Britain, but having been exposed to
aspects of it via enough culture-teaching bits of literature and films over the
years (bookwormish me)—whether British viewers would say about this scene, “It’s
amusing, but it’s hardly realistic about what we are like.” If they thought the
point was to make Roy into a ridiculous boor—with Brolin’s awkward smile in the
scene seeming to suit this fine—then they might affirm that Allen was “on the
money,” but I don’t know how much Allen meant to have Roy come across as
almost-always a gauche piece of work.
Pinto, for her part, seems to
catch nice glints of emotionally-apropos responses here; she acknowledges the
awkwardness of, or shows doubts about, Roy’s flirting with her as he is. (Note
how she responds to his talking about his seeing her undressing through the
window.) But the script doesn’t go too far to show how there’s something
broadly wrong, or at least hamhanded, about Roy’s agenda.
Anyway, Roy and Dia eventually develop
a relationship that supplants hers with her fiancé, including a rather
uproarious situation where the two families—of the British fiancé and the
Indian fiancée—meet, discover the marriage is off, and break into noisy
recriminations and such. I would suppose that the emotions here would be all
the more complex for the two families’ being of different ethnic backgrounds,
though the scene isn’t analyzed much; it is just played for a sort of
cacophonous dramatic development. To me, it has a flavor of the cross-cultural
(and normally fun) stuff in Bend It Like
Beckham (2002).
(Dia’s father is played by
Anupam Kher, who seems nowadays the go-to
actor for English-language films that need an Asian-Indian dad or winning authority
figure. Oddly, Allen doesn’t have his face squarely shown in the few scenes he’s
in.)
But Roy’s being someone who
keeps his wife waiting on having children because he is pursuing a writing
life, with increasing frustration—even while he is increasingly flirting with
the young Indian woman across the courtyard—make him look like an asshole of a overgrown
boy somewhat on the order of Alfie. The fact that Roy is played by Brolin
requires me to comment, shortly, on casting.
The film’s tone is milder than some comic aspects (potential) of the
relationship developments
The film, overall, doesn’t come
across as farce, or as (pitched) dark satire or the like either. There is,
particularly in passing little situations, a consciousness of the absurd
possibilities of life, which is typical of later Allen, and several
instantiations of his tried-and-true theme of the complications that arise
between otherwise well-meaning heterosexuals when “The heart wants what it
wants.” The tone tends to belie these thematic aspects.
Helena, too, ends up finding a
mate, Jonathan (Roger Ashton-Griffiths),
who runs a bookstore. Helena has been introduced to him via her suddenly having
gotten work in helping a household with their wardrobe (Allen always comes up
with these unlikely-minutiae plot hinges), and this gig was arranged by—of all
people—Alfie as an effort at goodwill toward Helena. Helena’s story seems the
most quaint and innocuous love story in the whole film, which seems to serve
Allen’s point that people who go ravenously seeking out love relationships to
stave off a loneliness near the end of life seem to do best, in a sense, when
they are fatuously falling for the likes of fortunetellers and meeting “soul
mates” on the advice of such people, even when their new mate is a balding old
sort who tries to commune with his deceased wife by séance. (The line is
uttered about Helena, at least once by Sally, “The illusions [Helena has] work
better than the medicine” she takes for her anxiety or such.)
Alfie, for his part, seems the
character most portrayed for his sub-story’s potential as farce. But here, what
I take issue with is the lack of originality, or really much to say, that comes
in this. At least, Alfie’s scenes usually pass by fairly quickly, and Anthony
Hopkins seems game about going through the motions of his role.
In its best respects, this film
might seem right for an older audience, who aren’t looking for a lot of wild
comedy, and who would like a film that gives some nod to the concern of facing
old age alone or not. (I leave aside the subplot of Roy’s stealing the novel
manuscript of a friend he believes is deceased, in order to try scoring another
deal with his publisher—a tastily comic subplot of its own.)
Younger viewers might find this
film a yawn. But some who make their way through it might like my observations
on the casting.
One little story point I kept
meaning to look up—the music Dia plays (on guitar, though the actress is obviously
faking it), which becomes a repeated theme in TDS echoing the “love atmosphere” that surrounds Roy regarding Dia,
is some piece by Luigi Boccherini, apparently. And isn’t this the same piece as,
or similar to, one in Hannah and Her
Sisters that seems to underscore the “love atmosphere” between Michael
Caine’s character and Barbara Hershey’s character? (I’m not as well-versed in
classical music as I should be.)
Some ironies and oddities about the casting
Start with Josh Brolin. He looks
like a Texas Ranger, or good for all sorts of American stories. As I watched him in TDS, I even thought of him playing George W. Bush in W. (2008)
(which I never saw; but I could imagine Brolin’s W., seated in the Oval Office,
looking with exaggerated puzzlement at a document, and a shy, well-groomed
functionary saying to him, “Sir? Mr. President? I believe you have Mr.
Rumsfeld’s snowflake memo upside-down”).
How did this chiseled, preternaturally
confident American get to live in London, pursuing a career as a fiction writer
(and going directly to books, apparently not having first worked his way up
through short stories in the likes of The
New Yorker). He’s married to a woman he sweet-talked in a park, played by
Naomi Watts, who to my ears is the only female in TDS with a Commonwealth accent who is always quite understandable.
So the American lunk with his Aussie wife are going through their marital
troubles, and yet he is fascinated by the Asian Indian in a nearby house….
Wait, am I freakin’?
Anthony Hopkins is identified in
real life as Welsh, but in London,
this wouldn’t stick out. Meanwhile, he is fixated on a prostitute with a
lower-class accent so thick, it could make a good dumbbell for him to lift in
his obsessive exercise.
Then there’s the actress (Anna Friel) playing Iris, the protégé of
Sally’s who ends up becoming an item with Sally’s boss. Iris is an ex-druggie
of an artist, but with a distinct accent—I wonder, is it Irish? Scottish?
(Friel’s father was Irish, according to the Wikipedia article on her)—and a
mumbling way of talking sometimes that is such that I had trouble following her
at times. As it happens, she rarely appears.
Quite a cultural variety of
folks for this love-centered story. Granted, Allen typically suits an actor to
a part, and lets the actor do his or her most natural to approach the part, and
that tends to work with nearly everyone here. But really, Josh Brolin in the
middle of this London
milieu—I don’t know….
Two years in the future…
The next film Allen would
release was Midnight in Paris (2011),
which was a big hit; I am viewing it in recent days, but I won’t present a
review for some time. Following it in most markets in which it would appear was
To Rome with Love (2012).
(Interestingly, according to its Wikipedia article, TDS was released in Australia
only in 2013, after the other two films I just mentioned. Meanwhile, TDS seems to have been released in 2010
everywhere else.) To Rome with Love, its production enabled by
an apparently Italian company (Medusa) and not the Spanish Mediapro, is similar
to TDS in a superficial way, in
having several little alternating stories involving respective little groups of
people.
But unlike TDS, To Rome is more an homage to arguably relatively-frivolous
little European films, especially Italian; it is not a rather soberly crafted
work like TDS, which seems suited to
intelligent adults. This is not to say Italian film is always silly; in fact,
in an extra on the To Rome DVD (Allen
films almost never come with
making-of docs or the like), Letty Aronson,
Allen’s sister and a producer on his films for about 20 years, says that To Rome grew out of Allen’s love for auteurs
Federico Fellini and Bernardo Bertolucci. Well, the best Italian films aren’t
silly baubles, but To Rome is crafted
with no greater ambition than to be a somewhat breezy entertainment; and
actually, it strikes me as more fun in a visceral-laugh sort of way than does TDS. For instance, Penélope Cruz is on
hand, as she was more strikingly in Vicky
Cristina Barcelona, and in To Rome
she is speaking Italian. Her role is as a prostitute (yes, this is
less-than-inspired for Allen), and the set of vignettes in which she features
are relatively expendable compared to Allen’s best work; but they are part of a
larger mosaic that seems fun for being as superficial as it is.
Another feature of To Rome is frequent use of a circa 1967
European (Italian?) pop song featuring a riffing organ and prominent electric
bass, with horns and voice, which gives the film a flavor of a hectic throwaway
work. Add in Alec Baldwin as a wisecracking version of his persona seen in the
old Capital One TV commercials, and you see we have Allen just goofing around,
but being more entertaining in his lighter way. My full review of To Rome is to come.
End note.
Main producers working with Allen
from Mediapro are Javier Mendez, on the executive level, and Jaume Roures on a
lower level, as includes Allen’s sister Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum. They
also appear in such roles for the Mediapro-produced [correction] Midnight in Paris. Also listed in the credits are Versatil Cinema
and, of course, Allen’s company Gravier.
