Seeing a new Woody Allen film in the theater has been a yearly ritual for so long it’s natural to go in with high expectations and willing to set aside the bad taste left in one’s mouth from the occasional misses among the hits. Magic in the Moonlight, unfortunately, now joins Mr. Allen’s small collection of misses. Thankfully in this, his 45th feature-length film as director, we are spared the Woody Allen surrogates of recent years who sound suspiciously like Mr. Allen while looking like Owen Wilson (Midnight in Paris, 2011) or Scarlett Johansson (Scoop, 2006). Refreshingly in Moonlight, we get Emma Stone being mostly Emma Stone (though at times her acting and enunciation are a tad too contemporary for the 1928-set film) and Colin Firth inhabiting the British upper crust that fits him like a glove, in a story about Stanley (Firth), a celebrated magician traveling to the south of France to debunk Sophie (Stone), a young psychic allegedly attempting to bilk a wealthy naïve widow desperate to connect with her dead husband.
The film opens on an intriguing and whimsical note with Mr. Firth’s magician in an Asian disguise (complete with a Fu-Manchu mustache) on stage in Berlin making an elephant disappear and performing other staged tricks for a rapt audience. Afterwards he is approached by an old friend (Simon McBurney) who tells him of Sophie, whose talents as a medium are apparently impressively convincing. Off to France they go, the dyspeptic Stanley nearly rubbing his hands together in glee in anticipation of un-masking the fraud. The French countryside provides stunning scenery and, as usual with Mr. Allen, the film’s pacing, framing, editing and camera work seem effortless. The sets and props are seductive (the glass decanters, the cigarette holders, the old cars!). And, also as per usual, his use of period music is mostly entrancing, although the choice of a snippet of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony for a heavy scene feels, well, heavy-handed.
In fact, much of the film feels heavy-handed, the chief issue being dialogue that is more often than not expository, Allen breaking one of the cardinal rules of filmmaking: show, don’t tell. Throughout the film characters are constantly telling each other what they think and what they feel, allowing for virtually no subtext or subtlety in the interactions, the end result being a film of extreme lightness despite a theme concerned with, ultimately, the existence of God. That the film feels like fluff while at the same exploring our place in the universe is the one irony of the film; too bad that irony wasn’t part of the fabric of the film itself. Allen has often successfully mined the “God question” for humor, poking fun, for example, at Ingmar Bergman’s serious film quests in Love and Death (1975), one of Allen’s zany classics. But in Magic in the Moonlight there is no winking at the camera; we are expected to take the characters at their word, making for a largely laughless comedy. It’s all so sincere and obvious. At the screening I attended I counted only four times when anyone in the audience actually laughed out loud. And the about-face Firth’s character makes, falling in love with Stone’s endearing con artist after dismissing outright any kind of affection for her feels forced and far too convenient, leading, disappointingly though certainly not unexpectedly, to the moment when they kiss, which comes off as both un-motivated and in questionable taste given the 28-year age difference between the two actors.
What we end up with is story-telling that feels rushed and, as with the few other of Mr. Allen’s failed comedies (Curse of the Jade Scorpion, 2001, and Whatever Works, 2009, come most immediately to mind), a film that is enjoyable to a degree as a work of entertainment but disappointing in its weightless-ness, given the talent, themes and resources involved. Such disappointment can morph into outright irritation, especially in the over-priced movie theaters of Manhattan and in light of the many classics Mr. Allen has produced over the years. We enter into this particular audience-filmmaker relationship knowing that this is the writer/director who gave us Annie Hall, Radio Days and Hannah and Her Sisters and, just last year, the startling Blue Jasmine. So, take what pleasure you can from the pleasing visuals and hang on to the hope that Mr. Allen, an amateur magician, will pull a true magic trick from his sleeve next time.
Mike Fishman
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