This 'Wonder Wheel' turns lame

Woody Allen's latest sinks toward the bottom of the director's large filmography.

At times, Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel feels more like a play than a movie -- and not a very good play at that, something along the lines of cut-rate Eugene O'Neill.

As with most Allen movies, a nicely composed surface masks the paucity of the drama. Put another way, the peripherals are top notch. Vittorio Storaro's cinematography and Santo Loquasto's production design skillfully blend beauty and nostalgia in creating the world of Coney Island during the 1950s. Visual competence goes only so far, and the overall effect of Wonder Wheel tracks toward abiding unpleasantness.

Allen breaks little new ground as he tackles familiar themes in this aggressively retro setting: love, betrayal and the way sexual desire and love can blur, creating uncomfortable emotional smudges for all involved.

If you want to spend time wondering how all this relates to Allen's well-publicized private life, have it. But taken on its own terms, the movie represents a misbegotten journey into a lower-class hell of the 1950s. The movie feels strained, artificial and tawdry.

Wonder Wheel revolves around a massively disappointed woman named Ginny (Kate Winslet). After a disastrous first marriage (she cheated), Ginny married Humpty (Jim Belushi). Humpty provides Ginny with stability and safety. He more or less tolerates Ginny's young son (Jack Gore), who happens to be a pyromaniac. The kid likes to set fires.

The arrival of Humpty's daughter (Juno Temple) from a previous marriage upsets Ginny's applecart, which isn't all that sturdy to being with. Humpty, a raging alcoholic who's no longer drinking, still manages to rage. He's Ralph Kramden without the laughs.

Juno's Carolina has been estranged from Humpty, but she fears reprisals from the mobster husband she's fleeing. Humpty warned his daughter against marrying a mob guy, but Carolina didn't listen. It doesn't take long for Humpty to crack; he loves Carolina too much permanently to reject her. Besides, she has no place else to turn.

All of these characters are penned up in a shack overlooking the Coney Island boardwalk, where Humpty operates the merry-go-round and Ginny works as a waitress in a clam house.

Allen sets us up for a kitchen sink drama that's intermittently narrated by a Coney Island lifeguard (Justin Timberlake), a dreamer. Timberlake's character aspires to be a playwright. He also starts an affair with Ginny, who once had acting ambitions and who imagines that she might find a better life with Timberlake's Mickey. She separates herself from reality by claiming that she's only "acting" the part of a waitress.

The actors are often stuck with dialogue that might better have suited Allen's contemporary New York characters, but, in this instance, turns them into labored fictional creations. Temple does her best to be young and flighty. The usually wonderful Winslet elbows her way into an unappealing version of a Blanch DuBois-scale unraveling. Timberlake does his best to portray an Army veteran who dropped out of NYU but doesn't take easily to the role. Belushi either pleads Humpty's case or bellows like a wounded ox.

I'd put Wonder Wheel near the bottom of Allen's abundant filmography. The story isn't very good and it leaves a bad aftertaste when it's done. I'd call that a double whammy of badness.

A lukewarm helping of Woody Allen

Allen travels back to the 1930s for Cafe Society.

There was a time when a Woody Allen movie felt as if it were entirely of its moment. Anticipation for each new Allen movie ran high whether the director was operating in comic or serious mode. Then came scandal, the onslaught of age and a changing movie environment.

These days, a Woody Allen movie seldom feels like an occasion marked by urgency, so it's probably not surprising that Allen's latest -- Cafe Society -- retreats into the 1930s for a story split between Los Angeles and New York.

Though hardly a knockout, Cafe Days qualifies as a showcase of sorts, less for Allen than for his production designer, Santo Loquasto, and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. Between them, they create a Los Angeles blessed by pre-pollution light and fashionable ease.

Allen's screenplay doesn't exactly break new thematic ground as it toys with issues involving love, infidelity, betrayal, guilt and navel gazing about mortality.

The story centers Bobby Doorman (Jesse Eisenberg), a Bronx kid who travels to California in search of a career. Bobby hopes that his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) will help him get his feet on the ground.

Phil, you see, is one of Hollywood's top agents, a guy who knows everyone.

Bobby's parents (Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott) disagree about whether Phil will be of much help. Mom says, "yes." Dad is skeptical, but his wife dismisses him as "stupid."

Phil gradually accepts Bobby as a trusted ally. Blood ties, after all, are stronger than the tenuous threads that stitch Hollywood alliances together.

Meanwhile, the story keeps a foot in New York, where it follows the development of Bobby's older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a gangster whose power grows along with the number of bodies he buries in the cement of metropolitan area construction sites.

Allen -- again with Storaro's help -- has done something I didn't know was possible. He has made Kirsten Stewart, who portrays Phil's secretary, look like a movie star from another era. I don't think anyone has ever made Stewart look more classically beautiful.

Predictably, young Bobby falls for Stewart's Vonnie. The complication: Vonnie is the midst of an affair with her married boss, Carell's Phil. Will Vonnie realize that Bobby is the perfect man for her or will she cling to Phil?

Blake Lively enters the movie late; she plays Veronica, a woman who captivates Bobby -- at least briefly -- when he returns to New York to run Les Tropiques, a nightclub that his older brother Ben has acquired through thuggery.

All of this is narrated by Allen, making Cafe Society seem like one of Allen's New Yorker short stories. The movie passes easily, except for a couple of clinkers. A riff about one of the character's 11th hour conversions to Catholicism (it has an afterlife, Judaism doesn't) and an early-picture bit in which Bobby meets with an inexperienced hooker fall flat.

As the stand-in for the kind of character Allen once played, Eisenberg does well enough; Carell conveys Phil's self-assurance along with bouts of torment, but it's Stewart who emerges as the prize in Allen's ensemble.

Allen eventually unites the New York and Los Angeles parts of the movie, but the dramatic stakes seldom seem high enough to elevate Cafe Society above a lukewarm period piece about a couple of characters who obsess over the lives they might have led.

Different costumes and new actors can't disguise the fact that for Allen, Cafe Society is more of the same -- and the lesser for it.

Woody's latest breaks little new ground

An unconvincing work about a depressed philosophy professor.

In his new movie Irrational Man, Woody Allen chews over existential and ethical questions that feel so familiar, they go down without much struggle. That's not a good thing for a movie that's trying to deal with disturbing moral questions.

Allen's movie toys with big ideas, but little in Irrational Man seems deeply felt. And the movie's intellectual life seems more like patina than a rich vein of dramatic ore.

A capable Joaquin Phoenix plays Abe Lucas, a dispirited philosophy professor and former political activist who has concluded that life is meaningless.

Newly arrived at fictional Braylin College in Rhode Island, Abe is regarded as brilliant but erratic, maybe even a little scary. He has a reputation as a womanizer, and doesn't seem to care about anything. He goes nowhere without a flask full of single-malt Scotch.

Allen does a decent job establishing an academic milieu that seems far removed from mundane realities, but doesn't seem to know what to do with the rest of his movie, which eventually arrives at a far-fetched turning point.

Abe springs to life only after he tries to plan the perfect murder.

Of course, there's also sex.

Seeing an opportunity to relieve her boredom, an unhappily married professor (Parker Posey) tries to drag Abe into the sack. Downtrodden and impotent, Abe can't initially oblige.

Abe also resists but ultimately succumbs to the earnest charms of one of his students (a lively and appealing Emma Stone). By the time Abe gives in to Jill, thoughts of murder have reinvigorated his dormant libido.

The supposedly fascinating Abe begins to take over Jill's life. She's smart, young and still-impressionable. She's also beginning to lose touch with her adoring boyfriend, a sincere college kid played by Jamie Blackley.

At various times, Allen makes us privy to Abe's thoughts. At other times, we listen to Jill's thoughts, not that either of them is all that interesting.

Particularly in the early going, Allen clutters the dialogue with talk about Kierkegaard and Kant. Maybe that's why the movie seems like a strange hybrid: part term paper, part thriller and part satire about academia.

The theme in Irrational Man -- the meaning of ethics in a meaningless and random universe -- was better handled by Allen in movies such as Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point.

I'd say Irrational Man improves on Allen's last outing, Magic in the Moonlight, which also cast Stone in a principal role, and Phoenix, Stone and Posey remain in good form throughout.

But for all its attempts to deal with weighty matters, Irrational Man comes off as slight. It's a minor addition to the expansive Allen catalog -- not to mention one that overuses Ramsey Lewis' rendition of The In Crowd.

The bottom line: Irrational Man isn't difficult to watch; it is, however, not always easy to believe.

'Magic' shines a very pale light

A yawn of a movie from Woody Allen.

Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight -- another Allen-directed bauble set in Europe -- is a minor addition to a long list of movies that includes a handful of major films, not a sum to be sniffed at.

In setting magic against reason and extending the idea of magic to all matters that might be deemed spiritual, Allen's latest suggests that an oft-visited thematic well may have run dry.

Beautifully shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji and equally well-crafted by production designer Anne Seibel, Magic in the Moonlight is not without its virtues, notably Colin Firth's supremely irritable performance as Stanley Crawford, a magician who has devoted his life to perfecting his act and debunking faux spiritualists.

Visually, the movie -- much of it set on the Cote d'Azur during the 1920s -- is appealing enough. But the ideas in Magic in the Moonlight adhere to the movie's surface like a series of philosophical Post-it notes.

Is there a God? Is this life and what we're able to perceive about it all there is? How should we react if the universe is an uncaring mechanism in which we are random occurrences? What role does love play in all of this and can love and attraction ever be explained?

Those are interesting questions, but in Magic, they're something to be debated by the characters rather than perplexities woven into the movie's fabric.

Put another way, there's plenty of craft in Allen's movie and not enough sleight of hand.

The plot of Magic in the Moonlight may have been better suited to one of Allen's short stories than to a full-blown movie. Firth's Stanley -- who performs as a Chinese magician named Wei Ling Soo -- is asked by a less-accomplished illusionist (Simon McBurney) to visit a wealthy widow who has fallen under the sway of an American spiritualist (Emma Stone) and her ambitious mother (Marcia Gay Harden).

Stone doesn't seem quite up to the task of playing a mysterious woman who claims to be able to commune with the dead. A young Mia Farrow might have pulled it off or certainly Cate Blanchett, who starred in the much better Blue Jasmine.

Predictably, Stanley -- the great rationalist -- finds himself stuck in the muddy waters of infatuation. Despite the fact that he's already engaged and despite his commitment to pure reason, he's enchanted by Stone's Sophie.

At the same time, the wealthy but shallow Brice (Hamish Linklater) also has fallen for Sophie, offering her a life of great material ease.

Additional characters make appearances, but the core of Magic in the Moonlight rests on Firth and Stone's shoulders.

Performances aside, the movie's core feels depleted and overworked, dimming what might have been the gem-like quality of a well-appointed period piece.

I don't mean to suggest that Allen is finished as an artist. I've thought that before, and subsequent Allen movies (Match Point and Blue Jasmine, for example) have proven me wrong. But Magic in the Moonlight has a familiarity that makes for tedium.

Once again, Allen seems to be arguing with himself about contradictions many of us have learned to live with. Rather than leading the way as an artist, in Magic in the Moonlight, he seems to be chasing his own tail -- or is it tale?

The adventures of an unlikely gigolo

John Turturro wrote and directed Fading Gigolo, a comedy built around the notion that attractive women would pay an obscure florist, played by Turturro, to have sex with them.

The movie's sexual antics, which take place with women played by Sharon Stone and Sofia Vergara, are supplemented by a more appealing strain of comedy.

Toward the end of the movie, Woody Allen -- who plays Turturro's pimp Murray -- is dragged before a court of Brooklyn-based Hasidic rabbis who charge him with corrupting the morals of a beautiful, gap-toothed widow (Vanessa Paradis).

Murray's troubles start when he convinces Paradis's Avigal, who's also a member of the Hasidic community, to visit Turturro's Fioravante.

In a series of tender massage scenes, Fioravante awakens the widow's dormant senses. Avigal begins to overcome her grief and isolation.

The odd relationship between Fioravante and Avigal displeases Dovi (Liev Schreiber). He's the leader of a Hasidic neighborhood crime patrol, and he wants to marry Avigal, who seems to have had a half dozen or so children.

Although Fading Gigolo qualifies as a bona fide mess, it contains moments that suggest how close Tuturro came to finding a tone that perfectly reflects the hodgepodge quality of contemporary life.

Perhaps to emphasize the notion of blurring ethnic boundaries, Allen's Murray lives with a black woman (Tonya Pinkins) who has four sons, a relationship that seems almost incidental to anything else in the film.

I say all of this as a way of expressing fondness for a movie that I can't defend as a success.

Turturro's Fioravante is a quiet, almost stoic man, perhaps the wrong main character in a film that (in my view) needed to surrender to its wackiness, to thoroughly embrace the comic humanity of a moment when so many lines are being erased and so many new lines have yet to be drawn.

Blanchett brilliant in 'Blue Jasmine'

First the simple good news: Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine finds the director in fine form.

Now, a work inspired by figures as disparate as Tennessee Williams and Bernie Madoff seems like an impossible, perhaps even ludicrous, concoction. But in borrowing elements from both reality and drama, Allen has given Blue Jasmine a voice all its own.

The movie also serves as a dazzling showcase for an actress who hardly needs one. Cate Blanchett is brilliant, funny and fiercely scattered as the wife of a fallen Wall Street wheeler-dealer named Hal (Alec Baldwin). Jasmine has hit bottom since her philandering husband was jailed for a massive fraud that prompted the government to seize everything the couple owned.

Mercurial, rueful and sophisticated -- at least when it comes to matters of style -- Blanchett's Jasmine draws on Blanche DuBois from Williams's famed A Streetcar Named Desire, a role she played in New York in 2009 to much acclaim.

Bereft of resources, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco to live with her sister (Sally Hawkins), a divorced woman whose former husband (Andrew Dice Clay) was one of Hal's victims. And, yes, Clay -- someone I had no desire ever to see again -- acquits himself well here. It's an interesting bit of casting.

Like Stella in Williams's play, Hawkins's Ginger is involved with a boisterous and sometimes crude mechanic (a fiery Bobby Cannavale). I'm not entirely sure Cannavale's Chili makes a great deal of sense, but the character doesn't detract, either. The same can be said for Michael Stuhlbarg who shows up as a dentist who hires Jasmine as a receptionist, and then tries to force her into a sexual relationship.

Happily, Allen hasn't attempted an updated replication of Williams's play; he uses Streetcar as a launching pad from which he can examine what happens when the nouveau riche suddenly become the nouveau poor.

Those who prefer Allen with laughs should know that he hasn't stripped the proceedings of humor, but -- at least for me -- there was considerably more pain than hilarity in Jasmine's precipitous decline.

In some ways, Blanchett is the movie. She fills Jasmine with a mixture of disdain and anxiety: This -- Allen seems to be saying -- is how we arrive at Blanche DuBois in 2013. Tossed off the Wall Street planation, Jasmine has been left for near-dead.

We see glimpses of the person Jasmine once was when she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a San Francisco businessman with political ambitions. Dwight understands that Jasmine is the kind of woman he proudly can drape over his arm. She knows how to behave herself around money, an asset for any politician's spouse. And, when she's on her game, she looks great.

Of course, Dwight eventually must discover how wrong he is about Jasmine. It's a bit of a stretch to think that the wife of a notorious Wall Street criminal wouldn't instantly be recognizable to someone like Dwight, but this lapse of plausibility also proves forgivable in light of Blanchett's bravura turn.

Baldwin's Hal, whose criminality fuels the story, is seen in flashbacks that put both his arrogance and indifference to conventional morality finds on display.

In what seems a digression as much as an enrichment, Louis C.K. shows up as an alternative suitor for Ginger, someone who gives the so-called "lesser" sister a chance to attain a new, more confident sense of her self. Don't expect a happily-ever-after.

By the time, Blue Jasmine concludes, Jasmine's personality has shattered. She's left talking to herself, one of those sad, anonymous people you see wandering the streets of some cities. It's a sobering moment, and it makes you wonder: Has Jasmine been talking to herself for her entire life? Has she ever been able to step outside the kind of delusions that make her so appalling, so human and so deeply tragic?

Old material in an ancient city

Woody Allen's To Rome With Love is no valentine.

Watching Woody Allen in his new film To Rome With Love, I found it impossible not to wonder whether, at 76, Allen hasn't lost a little something off his fast ball -- at least as an actor. Playing a retired opera director who believes he has discovered a gifted new tenor, Allen's one-liners arrive a bit late, like a tardy traveler after the train already has left the station.

But watching a cranky Allen do his cranky thing isn't the only problem with To Rome With Love: Allen isn't at his best behind the camera, either: To Rome with Love seems consistently off-key, a comedy that's unable to find a sustained rhythm.

In To Rome With Love, Allen plays Jerry, a man who visits Rome with his wife (Judy Davis) to meet his daughter (Alison Pill) and her new fiance (Flavio Parenti). When it comes to delivering a line, by the way, Davis doesn't miss a beat.

Jerry also meets the father of the future groom (Fabio Armiliato), an undertaker blessed with a beautiful singing voice -- but one he's only able to use while singing in the shower.

The undertaker's plight leads to a sight gag that stands as the movie's comic centerpiece, but you can see it coming all the way from the Via Veneto, and, once revealed, the joke is repeated enough to lose its edge.

Allen isn't only interested in Jerry's desperation. As if writing short stories for The New Yorker, he weaves a variety of brief tales into a series of alternating vignettes on love Roman style or, more precisely, Allen style -- adding a footnote about the perils of celebrity, which doesn't really amount to much.

In these additional stories, Alec Baldwin plays an architect who's revisiting Rome. Once an ambitious young man, Baldwin's John is a study in capitulation; he now designs shopping malls. Early on, John runs into a young architecture student (Jesse Eisenberg) who lives in the Trastevere neighborhood, John's former haunt.

Eisenberg's character shares an apartment and a relationship with Sally (Greta Gerwig), but he's smitten by one of Sally's visiting friends, a young actress played by Ellen Page.

Rather than developing into a real character, John becomes a kind of spectral observer: He's constantly commenting on Eisenberg's moves, warning him that if he falls for Page's Monica, he'll surely be sorry.

Allen uses another of the movie's stories to comment on the perils of celebrity. Roberto Benigni plays Leopoldo, a nondescript Roman who suddenly finds himself hounded by photographers and TV journalists eager to record his every thought -- no matter how banal. The joke here centers on the fact that Benigni's character is being stalked by an avid but fickle media that turns him into an attention junkie before shifting its gaze to someone else.

In yet another story, a provincial husband (Alessandro Tiberi) is forced to introduce a gorgeous hooker (Penelope Cruz) to his conservative Roman relatives, claiming that she's really his wife. This farcical situation arises after the young man's real wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) gets lost looking for a hair stylist in Rome, and winds up in a flirtatious relationship with an Italian actor (Antonio Albanese).

The point: Through these adventitious adulterous relationships, husband and wife are able to unlock their libidinous vaults -- and grow.

The fault here lies not with the cast, but with material that's too anemic to sustain full-blooded drama or robust farce. Even the Roman setting can't disguise the fact that Allen seems to be treading water.

To Rome With Love might have been unbearable had it not been for Rome itself. Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji bathe the Eternal City in affectionate light as they take us through some of its major sites, seldom veering off the beaten track. But even that only goes so far.

Allen's final shot -- a brass band playing Volare on the Spanish Steps -- doesn't vibrate with the expected magic, and as I took it in, I felt much as I did throughout most of this pleasantly mediocre addition to Allen's amazingly large collection: It just wasn't enough.

My predictions: Best screenplays

The predictions continue. Here's another installment in the march toward Oscar, my predictions for the best screenplays (adapted and original). Remember, the Oscars will be awarded on Sun. Feb. 26.

Best adapted screenplay, the nominees:
The Ides of March, George Clooney, Beau Willimon & Grant Heslov
The Descendants, Nat Faxon, Alexander Payne & Jim Rash
Hugo, John Logan
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan
Moneyball, Aaron Sorkin, Steven Zaillian & Stan Chervin

The Descendants is the likely winner here. The movie's trio of credited writers did a fine job adapting Kaui Hart Hemmings' 2007 novel for the screen. The three main characters -- a father and his two daughters -- were memorable, and the movie managed an exceptionally difficult feat, mixing humor and serious drama without capsizing.

Best original screenplay, the nominees:
Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen
Margin Call, JC Chandor
A Separation, Asghar Farhadi
The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius
Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig & Annie Mumulo

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is the front runner (and my pick) in a category that -- with the exception of Bridesmaids -- includes nothing but award-worthy nominees. A Separation likely will win best foreign-language film, so it probably will miss out in this category. It's possible, if unlikely, that the intricate and literate Margin Call screenplay could prevail.

I pick Allen because the movie was one of his most popular, and because every awards show needs to honor someone who isn't likely to show up.

Caveats: It's always dangerous to count Aaron Sorkin out, and if The Artist goes crazy, it might win best original screenplay.

*


Join me, Denver Post Film Critic Lisa Kennedy, Starz Denver Film Festival Director Britta Erickson and Oscar maven Bob Becker for an Oscar preview Cinema Salon, 7:30 p.m., Wed., Feb. 22 at the FilmCenter/Colfax, 2510 E. Colfax Ave. We'll predict, I'm sure, but we'll also talk about why we still care (if we do) about the whole damn business anyway.

*An update: The Writers Guild of America Sunday (Feb. 19) announced that The Descendants won its award for best adapted screenplay, and Midnight in Paris took the award for best original screenplay. After I originally posted my predictions in this category, a reader commented negatively on Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (See below). I wouldn't have voted for it as best original screenplay, either, but the professionals evidently admired it more than any other picture in the competition.

A fantasy about life in Paris in the 1920s

These days, Woody Allen seems to miss as often as he hits, but on occasion, he still connects. That’s the case with Midnight in Paris, Allen’s 41st film, a slender but entertaining amusement starring Owen Wilson as a Hollywood writer whose most ardent wish is granted: He gets to meet the inspiring artistic heroes who populated Paris during the 1920s.

Wilson’s Gil travels to Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy). Eager to establish his own Parisian agenda, Gil wanders into the city one evening. Around midnight, he joins a group of revelers who ride by in a vintage yellow car.

Voila! Suddenly Gil finds himself in the company of such sanctified luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Cole Porter.

Gil’s time-travel life – romantic and fulfilling -- contrasts with his depleted life in the present. He’s engaged to a beautiful but superficial woman (McAdams’ Inez). He's also at odds with Inez's all-business father, and he's sick of his life as a “Hollywood hack.” Commercially successful but dissatisfied, Gil wants to write a novel.

Allen treats Paris with as much reverence as he has treated Manhattan, reveling in the city’s trademark sights. Like Gil, he seems to understand that to visit Paris is to experience both present and past, to view today's sights while absorbing the vibe left by the great minds that have inhabited this most infatuating of cities.

Allen’s treatment of Paris borders on the nostalgic, but he also questions Gil’s (and perhaps our) fantasies about the 1920s. Does anyone’s moment look as good as a brilliant moment in the past? And would that past – if we could live in it – really meet our expectations?

Like Sean Penn in Sweet and Lowdown, Wilson delivers Allen’s lines without being trapped in an Allen imitation. Wilson doesn’t really fit into the Allen mold, which may explain why he holds his own. Wilson’s mixture of naivete, inadvertent humor and gee-whiz romanticism serves the character he’s playing.

Midnight in Paris features a large cast. Standouts include Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein; Corey Stoll as Hemingway; and Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali. Marion Cotillard is stuck playing Picasso’s winsome muse, an irresistible woman who contrasts with Gil's shrill and insensitive fiancée and her all-business family.

Midnight in Paris survives on charm and clever moments, not the least of which involves Gil’s suggestion that the great Luis Bunuel (Adrien De Van) make a movie about upper-crust guests who are unable to leave a dinner party, a premise that – of course – describes Bunuel’s 1962 Exterminating Angel, a biting satire.

Allen isn’t a satirist. In Midnight in Paris, he’s a whimsical pessimist who ultimately instructs us in the art of acceptance: We must settle for what’s available in our own time. Allen also can’t end the movie without offering Gil a ray of hope in the presence of a potential new woman in his life, making for an ending that’s easier than we might expect from a movie built on admiration for artists who made a habit of not pulling their punches.

Woody in rueful form. What else is new?

Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin, not so happy.

It seems like lifetimes ago since we eagerly looked forward to the next Woody Allen movie. By turning out a picture every year, Allen seems to have deflated our expectations. It also hasn’t helped that many of Allen’s recent movies have been less than wonderful. As a result, Allen finds himself in an odd position: His concerns as an artist are universal, but the movies seem to have left him behind.
Allen’s latest -- You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger -- arrives on screen without much feeling of urgency. Although it balances equal amounts of wit and rue, Allen’s new foray into the sea of emotional desperation we sometimes call “life” doesn’t cut very deeply, and, as you reflect on the movie, you may find yourself thinking, “Yeah, yeah, Woody. We know.”

Allen begins by applying Macbeth’s worldview to the proceedings: “It (life) is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Brilliant words, especially when you remember that Shakespeare didn't spend even one evening watching cable news.

After providing us with this incisive view of life’s meaning (or lack thereof), Allen traces a drama that more or less illustrates the point, catching a variety of characters in mid-flight as they flail against the inevitable letdown that's bred by self-serving ambition.

Filled with the usual infidelities, foolish decisions and personal disasters, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger falls somewhere between Allen’s comic and serious mode, which, I suppose, makes it a seriocomic exploration of the ways in which characters can betray themselves, sometimes with the help of unexpected twists of fate.

Tall Dark Stranger returns Allen to London where he introduces a variety of interrelated characters played by a large ensemble of capable actors.

I’ll give you a sampling: Josh Brolin portrays a novelist who’s unable to get his second book off the ground; his wife (Naomi Watts) works in art gallery. Her father (Anthony Hopkins) has left her mother (Gemma Jones) and has taken up with a younger woman (Lucy Punch) who boosts his libido while emptying his wallet.

For her part, Jones’ character seeks solace with a psychic (Pauline Collins), who pretty much tells her clients whatever they want to hear. For good measure, Allen casts Antonio Banderas as the owner of the art gallery where Watts’ character plies her trade.

The men don’t exactly come off as role models. Fearing the limiting encroachments of age, Hopkins' character makes an obvious fool of himself with a younger and entirely inappropriate woman. Fearful of failure, Brolin’s character becomes infatuated with a woman (Freida Pinto) he spies on while gazing across a courtyard into her conveniently open window.

Both Brolin and Hopkins give performances that exemplify a trait common to many Allen male characters, the assumption that a new romance (or maybe just a new bedmate) will provide the necessary courage to continue on life’s hopeless journey. They try to reinvigorate themselves through women.

Allen doesn’t take us anywhere we haven’t been with him before, a familiarity which may not breed contempt, but which may also account for the movie’s slightly washed-out feeling. Or maybe that’s the result of the existential exhaustion that pervades the movie, sort in the way humidity can take over a hot day in muggy climes.

So there you have it: another Allen movie, another case of the big-screen heebie-jeebies.

"Yeah, yeah. We know."

Although...

It probably doesn't hurt to hear it again.