Fourth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking
askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now
Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have
Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
Subsections below:
A skeptical eye on
mediums is part of the message
Magic echoes Manhattan at
one point, more as a quaint way a master echoes an old work than trying
as a showcase trick to push a controversial point
An ultimate
affirmation of a transcendent factor to life
[Edits 1/15/15.]
As I’ve said in previous recent entries on Woody Allen films,
within the past 15 years or so, he has been revisiting tropes and angles
(including story schemes or themes, genre styles, etc.) from the earlier, more
original phase of his career; and of course his more recent versions of these
aren’t his best. After I first watched about a third of Magic in the Moonlight, I saw he was revisiting his way of
treating serious themes with a playful genre style that also aped films from an
old cinematic period he esteemed, such as the late 1930s. A good example is The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), whose
~2001-produced DVD package makes note of his fondness for “Champaign comedies”
of the late 1930s, as a partial inspiration for Purple Rose. Another example of him aping a filmic period, less
with an eye to covering a serious theme, is The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). (See End note.)
Well, Magic seems
to pay homage to late 1930s films, especially screwball comedies, while also
depicting a period from the decade before, the 1920s. (It’s interesting how
these two decades have been conflated, rather anachronistically, in film lore
of more recent decades. For instance, The
Sting [1973] was about 1930s doings, but the Scott Joplin music that became
so big at its time of release, as part of its score, was from the 1920s. Of
course, the decades are about as distinct as are (1) 1920s jazz-age decadence and good times versus (2) 1930s economic deprivation and dark
gathering historical storm clouds in Europe.)
Of course, like Purple
Rose, Magic deals with some serious concerns—and this in a somewhat
disguised way, as if the film’s playful way of going about its business is more
for entertainment than for serious consideration of such things as whether God
exists. Some critics from the past summer, when this film was released, seemed
to see it as a second-rate (at best) Allen effort; one glib review even
dismissed the film as showing “trite” writing. While I think any serious Allen
fan will say this effort is not among his best, and the coverage of serious
issues here is perfunctory to a good extent, I was surprised at how good it was (on
its own terms), and I think critics really did miss how much Allen was doing a cinematic genre/period homage with this—that
is why the script’s writing may have seemed hokey or fussy-and-precious, and
the character differences so pointed. I mean, the fact that Magic is a nod to 1930s screwball comedy
still might not win a lot of viewers over—I think twenty-somethings and younger
especially would be turned off by this film—but it helps explain its style as
something more than Allen just being old and irrelevant.
A skeptical eye on
mediums is part of the message
I didn’t want to say terribly much of a critical nature
about this film—in part because I generally try to avoid chewing over a film
that is still “in play” as a current business proposition (this one’s DVDs
recently came out on the market, and I had to view it under library
restrictions typical of new releases with presumed high viewer demand). After
an opening scenario that shows a magician, a supposed Wei Ling Soo who can make
an elephant disappear on stage (with background music that at one point sounds
a bit like the suspenseful Jaws
theme), we find that the man is not a Chinese but a British man with a tart
tongue. He is enlisted in performing a service that we later find is his avocation/sideline
while his main career/passion is being a magician: on the side, he aims to
debunk fraudulent “mediums,” people who claim to have powers of clairvoyance
and the like.
Allen’s focus on magicians on the one hand and ESP-related
issues on the other (whether the two are interrelated in a story or not) has
come up numerous times in his work over decades. A reviewer of this film, Stephen Whitty, in the July
25, 2014, Star-Ledger (weekend review
section, p. 14; Whitty was a longtime film reviewer for that paper but has
recently become a syndicated writer still used by that paper, but more as
through a wire service, seemingly), likened this film—and about as readily
criticized it—as being on a par with Allen’s Scoop (2005), Jade Scorpion,
and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010).
(The last of these, I think, Magic arguably
shares the most in common with.) To me, in general, Allen seems to “obsess”
about ESP and the like more than he needs to (even if he very consistently
scorns it); here, he seems to have it stand in for people’s ideas of a “spirit
world” that suggests not only that (1)
there is more to the world than material reality that is apprehended by
empirical means, but by implication, (2)
the reality of God.
The film’s magician, real name Stanley Crawford (with stage
name Wei Ling Soo) and who poses as “Stanley Taplinger” when investigating the
latest alleged fraud, Sophie Baker, is drawn as an elegant, confirmed
materialist and cynic. He almost seems like a caricature of Allen in his more
skeptical/pessimistic mode, except here Stanley seems the object of some irony.
Stanley is played by Colin Firth, who is good at giving life to unlikely
characters or those (as here) with the gift of elaborate ways of talking. (In Where the Truth Lies [2005], a film I
started to do a review of and haven’t committed to finishing, he plays a sort
of show-biz comic partner to a Jerry Lewis-like character played by Kevin Bacon;
in fact, in following that film’s logic, Firth would be a sort of Dean Martin,
except he is a straight-man comic partner with a British accent, which might in
the context be a fish out of water, but he makes his part work surprisingly
well—it’s just that you can’t think of him as the more commonly known Dean
Martin.)
Stanley goes to the south of France, where the American
(from poor roots) Sophie Baker (Emma Stone, with big eyes and earnestly
plucky manner) is plying her trade in impressing the mother of a rich family,
whose son she is going to marry while aiming to have their money fund a school
for the occult arts she wants to start. (Stone, with shaped eyebrows, seems visually
in this film like a CGI cartoon character whose voice she would supply; but it
happens that—considering Allen’s films of the last ~15 years—she is among the “millennial”
actresses who are actually done well by [handled complimentarily] in a film of
his; not all are, of course [Evan Rachel Wood is an example of the latter; not
her fault].)
Given early intimations of her, Stanley smells a con artist;
“A pretty face never hurt a cheap swindler,” he opines at one moment. The jaded
Stanley circles Emma, who is somewhat like a Henry James character, an
earnest American girl dilating amid sophisticates in the Old World; and
eventually Stanley is impressed that she is the real thing as a medium. And he
starts to become an impresario for her, to hawk her abilities in accord with
the expectations of the scientific world and to the satisfaction of the
common-sense public; until, when his own aunt becomes gravely hurt in a car
accident, he starts to pray for the aunt’s recovery—and thus, in a whipsaw
change from “religious fervor” to recovery of his skeptical head, he suddenly
resolves to stand on his original sense that Sophie is a fake.
In short, the story contains some plot twists, though
overall it is not a ridiculously shaped story. But its premises may strike some
as quaint. Indeed, in the end, things wind up happily for Stanley and Sophie
(an unusual eventuality for Allen in his more esteemed films). I would suggest
that Allen fans give this one a look; it is not among his greats, as just about
anyone should expect; but among his works of the last 15 years, and among his
more comic ones among those, it isn’t
bad.
Cynics among Allen watchers may say that this story of a
middle-aged man becoming a love interest for a twenty-something ingénue is
“more of Allen’s preposterous May-December relationship crap,” and (conceding
the point temporarily) I think this film puts it in a league with Whatever Works (2009) in this narrow
way: in both, a pessimistic, dourly scientific man tries to hold out against
the naïve weltanschauung of a young
ingénue, and eventually is won to the promise and beguiling verve her youth
represents. Or something like that.
But in Magic, the
old male sourpuss seems more a butt of irony than he seemed in Whatever Works (even though Stanley was
most apt to make me laugh when he was reaching higher than usual to be arch
with his insulting and/or self-congratulatory attitude), where Larry David’s
character in Whatever Works just seemed a bore, honking out cynical remarks as if Allen was usually
too tired to really make that viewpoint sound fresh and entertaining at all.
Magic echoes Manhattan at
one point, more as a quaint way a master echoes an old work than trying
as a showcase trick to push a controversial point
Another way to look at Magic
is to consider that it borrows a story vignette idea from none other than Manhattan (1979), where the male
(Allen’s Isaac Davis) and the love-interest female (Diane Keaton’s character)
escape a rain storm in New York City and go into a planetarium, where their
couple’s-type hugger-mugger is arrayed against a suggestion of the breadth of
the universe, adding a sort of accidental cosmos-contemplation to the romantic
moment. This yields a dimension that either adds philosophic spice or seems
posturing, depending on your sympathy for Allen.
(I believe it is on the DVD for Hitchcock’s Marnie [1964] where, amid commentary, film
scholar and director Peter Bogdanovich notes that Hitchcock said, when
questioned about reusing an old trope of his, that what some call plagiarizing
of oneself is really a matter of the artist’s exercising a “style.”)
In Magic, Stanley
and Sophie are in a car (along the French seacoast) and the car
breaks down; he tries to fix it, and can’t quite. A thunderstorm comes, and
they seek shelter in a nearby astronomic observatory, which he reveals he used
to come to years before. He operates the controls to open the dome, and a
glimpse of the heavens is impressively exposed. I was struck by how this situation
echoed Manhattan, though in this case
(if it fully paralleled the earlier film), it would be like a vignette
involving Davis and Tracy, the young woman played by Mariel Hemingway, rather
than Davis with the Keaton character. But the way Allen, in general, works up a
thematic resonance, and prompts a consideration of meaning, via juxtaposing a hectic
romantic “cuddle moment” with a glimpse of the cosmos is a way he delivers a
trademark manner of making an intended resonant point. Whether, in this case
(or in earlier instances), it really strikes an edifying chord with modern
audiences is another matter. But in Magic,
at least it’s a way to flesh out a story that is, overall, aiming at charm rather than seeking to justify, against the tide of
public opinion, an unseemly kind of relationship.
Liberal-arts
resonances
Another typical Allen touch is an area where we can easily
take stands, but we also generally have to respect his right to fly this
cultural flag through his career. Allen alludes to cultural figures that
college grads who took some liberal-arts courses might be able to appreciate.
Yesterday, on the CBS Evening News, I
saw a bit of interview with prospective presidential candidate Marco Rubio, and
he said, as part of his idea how to be a kind of updated Republican with ideas
appropriate to the current times, that he felt the higher education system
should be reevaluated, to get rid of things it did that do not square with the
needs of the time.
Whenever a politico talks like a dour old Soviet about
paring down cultural offerings (if that’s what Rubio was gravitating toward),
one has to groan. No matter what phase of history we’re in, we need liberal
arts, and we need plenty of other fields. (Even paleontology, which Rubio with
his attitude about the college curriculum might be filed under.) It isn’t just
the colleges spilling money into these fields (which they don’t always do as
readily as some critics might think), it’s the hungering individual students
who seek these areas out, because these fields are the best way these students
can fulfill their genuine promise as scholars and future exponents of culture, and
as responsible, enlightened citizens.
So, although not everyone will be able to get these points,
some liberal-arts scholars will know:
* When Stanley refers (by way of explaining why someone
declined in life) to life being “nasty, brutish, and short, as the man said,”
the “man” is actually Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century British
political theoretician, and the full phrase is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short,” and Hobbes meant that, in a state of nature, that was how Man’s
life would be if there was no political organization to things. Though this
latter point isn’t exactly what Allen was talking about here.
* When Stanley more tendentiously talks about “Mr.
Nietzsche” having “disposed of the God matter rather convincingly,” what he is
referring to is the “God is dead” idea, which appears in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. But by this—unlike Stanley, whom Allen may be merely making look
like an acquired taste of an old cynic here—what Nietzsche was talking about
wasn’t literally that God as a being was literally dead, but that—with the
German writing in the nineteenth century—the old (Judeo-)Christian values such
as had shaped society closely in the Middle Ages were all but abandoned with
how society was developing in the more modern day. (By the way, an old playful
reference book I have that compiles real-life graffiti lists an instance of
this: “ ‘God is dead. —Nietzsche. ‘Nietzsche is dead.’ —God.”)
* The last instance of Allen flexing his culture-vulture
muscles (he also alludes to Shakespeare’s Hamlet
at one point, with some reference to “weary, stale…unprofitable”) is when he
engages in what I consider a tic of his—his coy reference to death, or (anthropomorphizing)
Death: Stanley saying “The only superpower certain to show up wears a black
robe.” This is Death, in the Ingmar Bergman sense, and we even saw Allen
invoke this so hokily as to have a stagy figure of the Grim Reaper in some
playful scenes in Scoop. I hope to
address this more when I talk about him as a writer, but why does he obsess
about Death so much as to make such references as this, which sound like the
clanging mannerisms of an old duffer who, if he doesn’t acutely fear death at
times, seems overly apt to sound off with his pet concerns as to show how out
of step the bustling world is with him?
An ultimate
affirmation of a transcendent factor to life
I would suggest that with Magic, Allen is showing that not all is “atoms and the void,” as
the philosopher Democritus summed up. Not only does the story heavy-handedly
discuss the “magic” that manages to inhere in the world—which, per Allen,
largely seems a matter of love and its ways of entering lives—but there is
beauty, too. At one point Stanley grumpily dismisses a seaside view’s beauty as
“transient,” but through this film, Allen shows—unless he fully believes that
the fact of making money with the appealing diversion of a film is “more real”
than the transcendence afforded by appreciation of beauty, wherever it
arises—that beauty is still a value and reality that counterbalances the pain
and tragedy in life.
The film has a colorful, somewhat flattening patina that
makes it seem like his To Rome with Love
(2012), where the visual look is almost comic-like, or “from a fantastic
world.” In outdoor shots where a low sun is creating some lens flare—the
cinematographer is Darius Khondji, who has worked with Allen on several
films starting with Anything Else
(2003)—and where there is the potential photographic distraction posed by the
angle of the sunlight, the color scheme (either during photo’ing or after) is
compensated so that the characters in relative shade have their color boosted a
bit (I’m not an expert in photography), with the result that they look
strangely flat, while colored and slightly dim. Either Allen allowed this passing
visual effect as “the best a tight budget could allow,” or he felt this added
to the sense of semi-fantasy the film connotes.
In either case, it adds to this film’s being a visual treat,
which shows that, within his budgets (this film seems to have been done
courtesy of an unusual ad hoc European-related producing arrangement, not with
a temporary partnership with a European media studio, as with other of his
2005-and-after films), he can deliver visions of beauty that somehow belie the
occasionally bitter, death-pondering, vinegar-striped visions of his later
films. And thus he suggests that God may lie in some of the details of life,
after all—in moments of beauty, times of wonderful personal exchanges, and
collected summing-up when life allows us to catch our breath.
End note.
Allen in Eric Lax, Conversations
with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007) speaks (pp. 255-58) about his favorite
films, apparent touchstones for his own creative endeavors; though he includes a
few more-modern works like The Godfather:
Part II among his American favorites (he also has a list of European favorites),
his list is of largely works pre-1960. A lot of his favorites are among the
more poetic, philosophical, and/or dark-side-of-life film greats. But when he
opts for a fun film, his hearkening back, in his obvious influences, to late
1930s or 1940s fluff is clear enough. But it would be a mistake to simply call
him a nostalgic sort (overall), as I will try to address when I sum him up in a
future entry as a writer.
