Magic in the Moonlight
Woody Allen (2014)
This year’s Woody Allen, even more obviously than usual, is redolent of several of its predecessors. The main character is Stanley Crawford – an Englishman, a professional illusionist and, in his offstage life, a contemptuous rationalist and renowned debunker of spiritualistic nonsense. He travels to the Côte d’Azur to expose Sophie Baker, a young American medium, for the fraud she must be – but Sophie’s personal charms, in combination with enchanting locale, are intoxicating. Stanley, intolerantly materialist and inveterately unromantic, falls for Sophie in more ways than one. Her psychic fakery is eventually exposed but not before it’s been suggested to Stanley that people should be allowed to live with their preferred illusions. In other words, Magic in the Moonlight brings to mind Scoop, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Whatever Works, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and, from much earlier in the Allen filmography, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. The set-up and resolution also draw on Pygmalion or, at least, on the screen version of My Fair Lady. Stanley Crawford is kin to the insensitive brainbox Henry Higgins. Stanley’s Aunt Vanessa, like Higgins’s mother, is the only one prepared to treat him like the egocentric little boy he is, and to impart home truths to him with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Sophie Baker gets engaged to Brice Catledge, her own Freddy Eynsford-Hill. Rich, foolishly adoring and fatuously handsome, Brice serenades Sophie on a ukulele – the arch period (1928) equivalent of Freddy’s ‘On the Street Where You Live’. In the final scene of Magic in the Moonlight, Stanley sits sadly alone, realising that he loves Sophie but, thanks to his own emotional ineptitude, has lost her. Like Eliza Dolittle, she announces her return unseen. Instead of the Cockney guttersnipe phrases that Henry Higgins once unkindly imitated, there are the séance-style knocks-once-for-yes despised by Stanley. A happy ending.
With a script as poor as this one, it’s unlikely anyone could have saved Magic in the Moonlight but the film depends heavily on the lead actor and Colin Firth is definitely not the man for the job. I never imagined I could miss Rex Harrison but Stanley needs some of the caustic, childishly tyrannical dynamism that Harrison gave Henry Higgins. If Woody Allen wanted a fifty-something British actor for the role, he might have done better to cast Ralph Fiennes (on the evidence of The Invisible Woman and The Grand Budapest Hotel anyway). Stanley’s stage magician persona is Wei Ling Soo and the film opens in a Berlin theatre where he’s performing. In Chinese robes and Fu Manchu make-up, Firth, acting broadly, appears at least to be enjoying himself as Stanley bellows at his incompetent assistants on his way backstage. Firth’s energy level dips as soon as he loses the help of a dressing-up box disguise. He becomes snooty Mr Darcy again and his languid, repressed quality is all wrong: it means there’s no impact to the changes of heart that Stanley undergoes. Taken in by Sophie’s séance performance, Firth admits he was wrong not to believe in more-things-in-heaven-and-earth: he makes it sound a minor error rather than the renunciation of a belief that’s shaped his whole life. There’s little more vigour in his U-turn back when Stanley decides Sophie was a fake after all. (Some people think Colin Firth shuns histrionics in order to supply something more subtle. He seems to me merely hollow, sometimes stiff.) To be fair to Firth, though, the odds are stacked against him. The plot twists simply aren’t followed through in terms of their impact on the characters that Woody Allen has created, Stanley especially. When he thinks Sophie’s genuine, he organises a press conference to announce the fact; when she’s exposed as a fraud, the arrogantly self-approving Stanley isn’t remotely troubled by having gone public in this way. It turns out his fellow magician and friend since schooldays, Howard Burkan, who asks for Stanley’s help in debunking Sophie, is envious of his international fame as an illusionist, feeds Sophie all the information she needs to unnerve Stanley with her mind-reading, and rigs the séance. This betrayal doesn’t appear to bother Stanley either, while Howard isn’t given the opportunity even to exult in having successfully tricked his rival.
There are references to Hobbes and Nietzsche but the film’s philosophy is summarised by Aunt Vanessa, who’s always been troubled by Stanley’s dogmatic scepticism and who, once her nephew knows that Sophie is a trickster yet remains smitten by her, advises that, ‘There may or may not be any purpose to life but there’s certainly magic in it’. The banality of this insight might not be a problem if Magic in the Moonlight was thoroughly entertaining but it’s far from that. Scene after scene is inert. There are British and American characters in the story; Woody Allen never has written the former as well as the latter – the words he puts in British mouths tend to sound second hand – but there’s not much to choose between them here. Of course the cast will have felt privileged to work with Allen but they’ve put themselves in the hands of a man who, on this occasion, is a virtual charlatan. I didn’t dislike Magic in the Moonlight as much as You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger but I felt embarrassed for the actors in a way I can’t remember feeling in any previous Allen film – in the early scenes particularly, they sound as if they’re trying out their lines without having got the hang of them. (They May be frozen by incredulity that the lines are so poor.) You can’t even console yourself, during the worst bits, that X or Y is bound to reappear soon enough to liven things up. Emma Stone isn’t bad as Sophie but Allen doesn’t give her the chance to express the character’s mixed feelings about duping a man to whom she’s increasingly attracted (and Firth gives her very little to play off). Simon McBurney, who usually overacts, is merely bland as Howard. On the relative plus side, Hamish Linklater, in the thankless role of Brice, creates a more nuanced character than the script supplies and Eileen Atkins, although unvarying, manages to make some of Aunt Vanessa’s lines sound wittier than they are. Marcia Gay Harden, as Sophie’s mercenary mother, is given nothing to do; Jacki Weaver is comparatively (if predictably) vivid as Brice’s mother, anxious to get in touch with her late husband on the other side. The film, photographed by Darius Khondji, looks very pretty, although the recreation of a Gatsby-style party on the French Riviera seems pointlessly lavish in the circumstances. There’s a mild interest in hearing Woody Allen arguing with himself again whether life is pointless because it ends in death but he’s conducted that debate more richly and enjoyably elsewhere. It’s Magic in the Moonlight that seems pointless, and it dies on the screen long before it ends.
21 September 2014