Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Kate Winslet, Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Jim Belushi
Intro:
This staginess might work in another context but here it lets the fire fizzle...
Woody Allen once famously quipped that his one regret was that he wasn’t someone else. Beneath its humorous absurdity lies a profound truth. Few artists are happy in their own skin, something about the difficulty and tragedy of life chafes within them. Allen still seems compelled to get behind the camera and, in that sense, he is indefatigable. Some of his films leave you wondering why he rushes them out so regularly, but most of them have at least something to recommend them. This one is another near miss with some good elements.
Once again, he tries his hand at the big American themes; the sense of domestic tragedy in the broken lives of ordinary folk. If all this sounds like it is haunted by the ghost of playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, this is precisely because it is, right down to the stage directions and the use of alcohol-fueled domestics.
The other thing late Allen’s work contains is juicy complex roles for mature women. Cate Blanchett blew everyone away with her heart-wrenching turn in Blue Jasmine, and now it is the turn of Kate Winslet. She plays Ginny. She is turning 40 and unfulfilled and working in a restaurant in Coney Island beneath the shadow of the Wonder Wheel. In the 1950s the New York theme park has seen better days, and so has Ginny’s marriage to reformed alcoholic Humpty (Jim Belushi doing his dogged best). Ginny has a young son, Richie, by a previous relationship, and Humpty has sort of taken them both under his wing, albeit rather grudgingly.
Richie, reacting sulkily to the marital tension, is becoming a pathological pyromaniac. Other fires of a romantic nature fuel the rest of the plot. Ginny falls for a younger man, Mickey (Justin Timberlake), who is the local beach lifeguard, but Mickey later becomes attracted to Carolina (Juno Temple), the once-estranged daughter of Humpty who comes to stay with Humpty and Ginny whilst fleeing her own dark past. The prospect of all kinds of inappropriate and unrequited love attachments abound.
The film’s period setting is economically realised and is given a honey-soaked glow by the brilliant DOP Vittorio Storaro. To be fair, Winslet frequently hits convincing notes dramatically but, in the end, her character seems left with nowhere to go and it is hard to really invest the identification that is required for true tragedy. In some ways, it is as if Allen is unsure whether to trust his filmmaking skills or to make this into an ersatz play. Annoying face to camera explanations from Timberlake’s character break the fourth wall in a distracting way and make it look as if Allen couldn’t work out how to put these insights into characters’ mouths. Sometimes, he just can’t get the performances that he obviously envisioned and there are too many scenes where the actors are hanging around stiffly waiting for someone’s rant to finish so they can say their next line. This staginess might work in another context but here it lets the fire fizzle to a smoulder when it should be blazing.
